Guilherme Gavrilov

Guilherme Gavrilov (1860-1887) was a Portuguese-Russian writer.
Gavrilov was born to a Russian merchant-sailor father and a Portuguese prostitute mother in Silvassa, at that time a port city in Portuguese India. His parents married shortly before his birth and when only four years old the family moved back to St. Petersburg in Russia.
Early Life
The collapse of Gavrilov's fathers shipping line when aged 12 devastated the family. Guilherme was sent home from boarding school in Tynemouth,England and was forced to give up his studies and accompany his father around Russia as a travelling salesman. The family lived in poverty for four years in order to save money for a shipping enterprise. At the end of the four years, when they had almost reached the minimum amount necessary for a business loan, Russia experienced a short-period of Hyper-Inflaton, wiping out their assets. The experience informs the content of his novella "The Shoe" which tells of a destitute man who saves up for a year to buy a pair of expensive shoes sitting in the window of a cobbler's [ on Nevsky Prospekt. It is not until he attempts to purchase these shoes that he discovers they are priced per individual shoe. He decides to buy one anyway, and walks around the city with one bare foot.
Scintillating scotoma & predictions
Gavrilov suffered from Migraines throughout his entire life, and particularly from the visual neurological phenomenon of scintillating scotoma. Gavrilov attributed many of his story ideas to visions he perceived during these hallucinogenic episodes. His satirical work "The Prophecies of Tutenkhamun" is based on some of these, and ironically foretells the Russian Revolution, the life of Rasputin and the Russo-Japanese war of 1904.
Portuguese Diaries
Gavrilov is most noted for his novel "The Portuguese Diaries", an 1882 fictionalised account of a russian sailor, Ivan, who is the single survivor of a shipwreck in the Azores. Ivan recreates a miniture russia on the island and rules over the wild animals as a depostic Tsar, attempting to teach them the Russian Language. When the rescue ship reaches him, he takes it for an invading Navy, and is killed attempting to decapitate the captain. The novel was banned upon publication for the scathing way it mocked the rule of Alexander III of Russia. Gavrilov was sent to the Siberian town of Omsk for six months hard labour, Gavrilov wrote in his memoirs that "building a barracks with bricks was a comfortable respite from building worlds with words."
Feud with Chekhov, Death
Gavrilov took issue with Chekhov's demeaning characterisation of Sibierian towns, including Tomsk, where Gavrilov spent some of his teenage years. The two exchanged angry letters with one another in the literary journal Oskolki. Chekhov wrote that Gavrilov possessed "the mimetic qualities of an Indian parrot, able to forge to tone, pitch and timbre of his words, without any understanding of what they might actually mean". Gavrilov responded that, in India "The parrot is used by those sailors who, through age or illness, can no longer speak intelligably, and are dependent on the bird communicate cargo to potential sellers. The key to true writing is in speaking for others, in using a variety of voices but your own. I would much rather be the Parrot than the bird that senselessly sings for no other reason than to hear the sound of their own voice."
Shortly after this highly publicised exchange of letters, Gavrilov was found dead, floating in the Neva river, in St Petersburg. The cause of his death was never discovered.
Trivia
Gavrilov's mother, Liliana Da Costa, was the last woman in India to be charged with withcraft. The case never reached court.

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