[8] In 1876 he entered the Razumovsky boarding school, the source of what he later referred to as 'childhood grievances', but also an environment which nourished his riotous nature and in which he found himself popular among peers as storyteller.

[8] In the summer of 1890, he graduated from the Academy ranked sublieutenant and was posted to the 46th Dnieper Infantry Regiment (which he chose at random)[9] stationed in Proskurov (now Khmelnitsky), where he spent the next four years.

[10] Only "The Inquiry" (1894), his first publication to arouse critical comment, was concerned with the army, starting a series of Russian army-themed short stories: "A Place to Sleep" (1897), "The Night-shift" (1899), "Praporshchik" (1897), and "The Mission" (1901) which finally resulted in his most famous work, The Duel.

[10][12] After retiring from the service, without any definite plans for the future, or "any knowledge, academic or practical" (according to "Autobiography"), Kuprin embarked upon a five-year-long trip through the South-West of the Russian Empire.

[9] He tried many types of job, including dental care, land surveying, acting, being a circus performer, psalm singer, doctor, hunter, fisher, etc., each of these subsequently reflected in his fictional work.

The qualities necessary for a good journalist, he believed, were "mad courage, audacity, breadth of view, and amazing memory," gifts he considered himself to possess in full measure.

[14] Alongside feuilletons and chronicles, Kuprin wrote small sketches investigating particular environments, or portraying people of specific occupations or circumstances, later gathered into a collection.

In September 1901 Viktor Mirolyubov, the editor of Zhurnal Dlya Vsekh, invited Kuprin to join this popular Petersburg monthly, and in December he moved to the capital.

[18][23][24] In 1901 Kuprin joined the Moscow Sreda (Wednesday) literary society, which was founded in 1899 by Nikolay Teleshov, and united mostly the young realist writers, among whom were Gorky, Bunin, and Leonid Andreyev.

[18] Leo Tolstoy praised the collection for its vivid language; and critics were almost unanimous in their approbation, pointing to Kuprin's closeness in themes and technique to Chekhov and Gorky.

Angel Bogdanovich of Mir Bozhy (who in 1897 had written unflatteringly of Moloch) now praised Kuprin's compact style and his ability to convey a feeling of effervescent joie de vivre.

His employment with the magazine left him little time for his own writing; and when his work did appear in Mir Bozhy, rumor had it that he owed his success to his family connections.

[18] Other themes of Kuprin's prose of this period include hypocrisy ("A Quiet Life", 1904; "Good Company", 1905), bigotry ("Measles", 1904), and the degeneration of the idle class ("The High Priest", 1905).

[33] The Black Sea Fleet commander, Admiral Grigory Chukhnin, generally seen as responsible for the tragedy, ordered Kuprin to leave Sevastopol within 48 hours, and instituted legal proceedings for defamation.

In 1909–1910 he made an air balloon flight with a renowned sportsman, Sergey Utochkin, then ventured into the Black Sea depths as a diver, and accompanied the airman Ivan Zaikin in his airplane trips.

The same year saw the publication of "Seasickness", a short story telling of the rape of a Social Democrat heroine - and showing her revolutionary husband in an unfavorable light, which Gorky regarded as a deliberate slur on the Russian Socialists.

[34][36] His best-known 1912–1914 stories are "Black Lightning" and "Anathema", while his visit to the South of France between April and July 1912 gave rise to "The Cote d'Azur", the twenty sketches forming a cycle of travel impressions.

Among his few stories that reflected the war, most notable were his satires ("Goga Veselov", "The Cantaloups", "Daddy", "Grunya"), taking a swipe at the cynics who were making fortunes upon the nation's grievances.

Returning to Gatchina, he expressed his enthusiasm at the collapse of tsarism in a series of articles, and in May started editing the Socialist Revolutionary Party's newspaper Svobodnaia Rossiya (Free Russia), contributing also to Volnost (Freedom) and Petrogradskii Listok (The Petrograd Leaflet).

In the articles he contributed to various papers till mid-1918 – Petrogradskoe Ekho (Petrograd Echo), Vecherneye Slovo (Evening Word), and Zaria (Dawn) among them – his attitude to the new regime remained ambivalent.

He recognized the historical significance of the Bolshevik Revolution, and admired Lenin as "an honest and courageous man," stating that "Bolshevism constitutes a great, pure, disinterested doctrine, that is inevitable for mankind.

"[39][40] Still, while working for a brief time with Maxim Gorky at the World Literature publishing company, he criticized prodrazverstka and the policy of War Communism,[9] arguing that the Bolsheviks threatened Russian culture, and that their insufficient knowledge of the country had brought suffering to peasants.

[43] His visit to southwest France in 1925 inspired "Crimson Blood" (1926), a colorful account of a bullfight in Bayonne, followed in 1927 by "The Blessed South", four sketches on Gascony and the Hautes-Pyrénées.

[42][43] The three major works of Kuprin's Parisian years were The Wheel of Time (13 sketches styled as a novel, 1929), the autobiographical The Junkers (1932), and the romantic "Jeannette" (1933), describing an elderly professor's affection for a little girl in his neighborhood.

In early June they moved to a dacha, owned by the Soviet Union of Writers, at Golitsyno, outside Moscow, where Kuprin received medical attention, and rested till the winter.

[50] Kurpin's second wife was Yelizaveta Geinrikh (1882–1942), a daughter of the Hungarian revolutionary Morits Rotoni-Geinrich, brought up by the family of Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, her sister Maria's husband.

[49] Ksenia Kuprina (1908–1981) in the late 1920s became a Paul Poiret model and then actress who, as Kissa Kuprine, appeared in 11 films, starting with Le Diable au cœur (1927) by Marcel L'Herbier.

What he conceded in restraint to Chekhov, conviction to Gorky, and subtlety to Bunin, Kuprin made up for in narrative pace, construction of plot, and richness of theme.

Although he lived in an age when writers were carried away by literary experiments, Kuprin did not seek innovation and wrote only about the things he himself had experienced and his heroes are the next generation after Chekhov's pessimists.

All through the 20th century Alexander Kuprin remained "one of the widest read classics in Russian literature," with many films based on his works, partly due to "his vivid stories of the lives of ordinary people and unhappy love, his descriptions of the military and brothels, making him a writer for all times and places.