used for storing illegal literature and as a safe house for wanted revolutionaries. Her connections, which included members of Narodnaya Volya, led to her arrest in 1880, and a short term of imprisonment in the Peter and Paul Fortress. After the arrest and disappearance of most of her friends in the early 1880s, and finding herself in difficult financial circumstances, she turned increasingly to writing. She graduated from the Medical Courses in 1886, and studied obstetrics and gynaecology in Moscow until 1887. In 1887 she was arrested and imprisoned for participating in student demonstrations, and was later exiled to Tver for four years with her sister, where she was under police surveillance. In 1892 she moved to Voronezh with her husband, who had also served time in confinement for revolutionary activities. She found work as a doctor during outbreaks of cholera (1892–1893), and diphtheria, typhus and scarlet fever in 1894. During her time treating these epidemics, she stood up to local authorities, demanding a decent salary, badly needed equipment and sober staff, which had been denied to her and other women doctors. Dmitryeva became a full-time writer in 1895. She and her husband lived in Voronezh until 1917, while making occasional trips to Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Europe. During the Russian Civil War she fled to Sochi after losing her mother and 3 brothers to cold and starvation. She nearly died of starvation herself, and lost her husband who died after being imprisoned by the Bolsheviks. During the Soviet period she devoted her time to the cause of literacy, and to writing memoirs and children's stories. She died in Sochi in 1947. Literary work Dmitryeva made her literary debut in 1877 as a writer of peasant stories at a time when educated Russians were eager to learn about peasants and rural life. Her first story To Seek Justice appeared in a newspaper in Saratov. Her story Akhmetka's Wife (1881) attracted favorable attention from critics and praise from Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, an established woman writer. Dmitryeva's works treated a wide variety of settings and characters. Besides rural Russia, her stories cover Ukraine, the Crimea and the Caucasus. In the course of her literary career she met Maxim Gorky, Leonid Andreyev, Vikenty Veresayev, and other well-known writers. Her works were published in the journals Russian Thought, The Herald of Europe and Russian Wealth. Her most popular work was the children's story A Boy