Abel Posse
Abel Parentini Posse was born on 7 January 1934, in the Argentine city of Córdoba where he only lived the first two years of his life. Two years after birth the family moved to the capital city of Buenos Aires due to his father's work commitments. His mother, Elba Alicia Posse, belonged to the creole landed oligarchy of Galician descent who held vast sugar mill estates in the North West province of Tucuman. Amongst the influential members of the Posse clan in the 19th century, the liberal Julio Argentino Roca stands out, twice president of the republic from 1880 to 1886 and also 1898 to 1904 (3). Posse fictionalized 19th century Tucuman in his novel El inquietante día de la vida (2001), where two distant family relatives are the protagonists; his maternal great-grandfather, Felipe Segundo Posse, and Julio Victor Posse, patron of the arts in the sugar producing province until the 1940s.
Vladimir Posse
Posse grew up in Saint Petersburg the youngest of six children; his brother Konstantin (1847–1928) was a mathematician who wrote a calculus textbook widely used in Russia. Vladimir was intellectually precocious, attending Fyodor Dostoyevsky's public readings and his funeral in 1881. He attended Saint Petersburg University (the philological and juridical faculties), being expelled in 1887; the following year he took a degree in law. In the 1890s, he slowly moved from the narodniks' populism to Marxist social democracy. In early 1899 he took over as editor of "Zhizn (Life)", previously a moderate populist magazine, in an attempt to merge populism and Legal Marxism. He thought he had an understanding with the leading Legal Marxists, but at the last moment they founded their own magazine, "Nachalo" ("The Beginning"). "Nachalo", however, was shut down by the government in June 1899, and the Legal Marxists moved to "Zhizn", since Posse was willing to forgive and forget. Posse continued to edit the magazine until it was suppressed by the Tsarist government in April 1901. He put his friend Maxim Gorky in charge of the magazine's literary section, giving the 30-year-old Gorky an opportunity to try his hand at editing.