Vasily Yakovlevich Eroshenko

Vasily Yakovlevich Eroshenko was a blind writer, Russian Esperantist, poet, musician, and educator. Vasily Yakovlevich Eroshenko was born in the sloboda of Obukhovka in the Kursk Governorate. At the age of four he lost his sight due to a serious illness. From 1899 to 1908 Eroshenko studied at the Moscow School for Blind Children and played in the Moscow Orchestra of the Blind. In 1912 Eroshenko went to London to study at the Academy of Music for the Blind and at the Royal College of Music. In 1914 he moved to Japan, where he studied at the Tokyo School for the Blind. Having mastered the Japanese language, he began publishing fairy tales, short stories, and poems.

From 1916 to 1919 Eroshenko lived and worked in Siam, Burma, and India. He returned to Japan in 1919 but was expelled from the country in 1921 on suspicion of Bolshevism. From 1921 to 1923 he lived and worked in China, teaching Esperanto at Peking University and interacting with Chinese writers, in particular Lu Xun.

From 1935 to 1945 Eroshenko founded and led a school for the blind in Turkmenistan. He then worked as a teacher at the Moscow School for Blind Children (1946–1948) and lived and worked in Tashkent (1949–1951). In 1952, gravely ill, he returned to his native Obukhovka, where he worked on his last book. Vasily Yakovlevich Eroshenko died on 23 December 1952 in Obukhovka.