Aitmatov Ch.

Chingiz Aitmatov, the Kirghiz Soviet prose writer writing on Kirghiz and Russian, born on December 12, 1928 in the village of Sheker, Talas region, Kirgizia. His father, Torekul Aitmatov, was one of the first Kirghiz communists and a regional party secretary. In 1937, while attending the Institute for Red Professorship in Moscow, Torekul was arrested and eventually liquidated on charges of bourgeois nationalism.

Between 1943 and 1952, Aitmatov was assistant to the Secretary of the Sheker Village Soviet. During this time, he tried his hand at translation, rendering Kataev's Sons of the Regiment and Babayevsky's White Birch in Kirghiz.

He attended the Animal Husbandry Division of the Kirghiz Agricultural Institute in Frunze, but changed from the study of livestock to the study of literature at the Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

He began his own literary career in 1952 with the publication of two stories in Russia: The Newspaper Boy Dziuio and Ashim. His first story written in Kirghiz was Ak jann ("White Rain"), which appeared in 1954.

He worked as roving correspondent for Pravda in Kirghizia from 1958 to 1966. His collection of short stories Tales of Mountains and Steppes (1963), won him the Lenin Prize. In 1967 he became a member of the Executive Board of the Soviet Writers Union, and in 1968 he won the Soviet State Prize for literature for his novel Farewell, Gulsary!, a tale of an old man reminiscing about the parallel lives of himself and his old horse, which is dying. Aitmatov won two more State Prizes in 1977 and 1983, and was named a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1978.

A major theme in Aitmatov's work is the inequality among men and women in traditional central Asian society. He also criticizes bias, the mullahs, lack of access to education for women, treatment of women as commodities, and polygamy. A good example of this is the tale Jamila (1958). The title character, a married village woman, falls in love with another man while her husband (who treats her more as an object of ownership than an object of love) is off at the front. In the end, the lovers run off together, abandoning their village and the traditional conventions.

In 1972 he wrote The White Ship, about an orphan boy dreams of becoming a fish so that he can join his father who, he believes, sails in the white ship on the Issyk-Kul Lake.

Aitmatov's 1973 play The Ascent of Mt. Fuji, written with Kaltai Mukhamedzhanov, dealt with the suppression of dissent and caused a sensation when produced in Moscow.

He was First Secretary and Chairman of the Cinema Union of Kirghizia from 1964 to 1985, and in 1985 he was named Chairman of the Kirghiz Writers Union. In the 1990s, he served as an advisor to Gorbachev and in 1990 was named Soviet Ambassabor to Luxemburg.

His most important works include: A Difficult Passage (1956), Face to Face (1957), Farewell, Gulsary! (1967), The First Teacher (1967), The White Ship (1972), The Ascent of Mt. Fuji (1973), and The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years (1980), which intertwines a treatment of ordinary people of Central Asia with a science fiction plot of space stations, aliens, and new planets.

Aitmatov has received numerous foreign awards, including the Gold Olive Branch of the Mediterranean Culture Research Center (1988), the Academy Award of the Japanese Institute of Oriental Philosophy (1988) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (1994).

He is currently a member of the Kyrgyzistan's parlimanent and serves as his nation's ambassador to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO, Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands and is based in Brussels. He has a son and a daughter.

Akhmatova A.A.

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko was born on 11 June 1889 near Odessa, her father Andrei Gorenko was a maritime engineer. Her aristocratic mother Inna Stogova was a former member of the radical political group Narodnaya Volya (People's Will). The young Akhmatova knew French poets by heart as well as the Russians. She grew up in Tsarskoe Selo where she attended school, completing her final year at Fundukleyevskaya gymnasia in Kiev (1907). The same year she enrolled at the Faculty of Law at the Kiev College for Women, later withdrawing to study literature in St. Petersburg. In 1903 Akhmatova met the poet Nikolai Gumilyov whose persistent wooing led to their marriage in 1910. They travelled abroad in 1910 and 1911. In Paris Akhmatova became friendly with the yet unknown artist Modigliani who drew her as Egyptian queens and dancers. Together they visited the Louvre and recited French poetry.

Akhmatova's first poem appeared in 1907 in Gumilyov's journal Sinus. She participated in the Guild of Poets organized by Gumilyov and Gorodetsky. Soon it disassociated itself from the symbolists, giving birth to Acmeism, whose avowed principles were an emphasis on clarity, freshness, a return to earth and close ties with the literature and culture of Europe and of all ages. The symbolist Annensky was their acknowledged teacher. The popular Gumilyovs frequented the fashionable artistic cafe The Stray Dog.

The first collection of Akhmatova's verse, Evening (Vecher, 1912), appeared under the pseudonym Anna Akhmatova, taken from her Tatar great-grandmother. Hailed for its Acmeist clarity, conciseness, compressed style and precise details, the collection concurrently espoused the romantic concept of evening as a time of awakening for the sensitive young adult to life, love, and grief. Its miniature love lyrics manifested subtlety of style and message. The collection Rosary (Chetki, 1914) showed marked changes in the poet's voice, from wary expectation of betrayal to disillusionment with love coupled with the worldliness of a femme fatale. The lyrics generated numerous female epigones whom the poet deplored in her "Epigram":
I taught women to speak ...
But, Lord. how to force them to be still!

After 1922 no new works of Akhmatova were published because her apolitical work was considered incompatible with the new order. Labeled an "internal emigre," she was given a meagre pension. Critics believed that her time had passed. Yet her verse continued to be cited by scholars of the Formalist school and admired by poetry lovers.

During her forced silence Akhmatova applied herself to the investigation of the life and works of Pushkin, producing some seminal articles published posthumously under the title On Pushkin (O Pushkine). She worked on The Reed (Trostnik, 1926-40) which contains poems on creation and features dedications to the poets Mandelshtam, Pasternak and Dante. From 1926 to 1940 Akhmatova lived with the art critic, Nikolai Punin. The mass arrests of the 1930s which included her son and Punin generated a dirge to human suffering, Requiem (1935-40), never published in the Soviet Union.

The wartime relaxation of controls on her publications ended with the decision of the Central Committee concerning the journals Zvezda and Leningrad which unleashed attacks on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko, resulting in their expulsion from the Union of Soviet Writers without the right to publish. As a means of support and appearing in print Akhmatova began to translate from numerous languages. Six volumes have appeared as separate imprints. Despite her success, Akhmatova complained that for a poet translating was comparable to devouring one's own brains.

Akhmatova's religious motifs are often laced with superstition and vestiges of paganism such as the willow, tree of water nymphs. Akhmatova's love lyrics, then, earned acclaim through their accessible beauty of content and form as well as for the novelty of a feminine voice expressing women's emotions. Scholars found subtle devices and honed imagery in these simple poems. The later poetry adds themes of poetic creation, readership, war, and death, along with longer lyric forms, sometimes achieved through cyclization, all contributing to a wider thematic scope and deepened content. Akhmatova's late hermetic works led some to insinuate a decline in talent, as others had done for Pushkin. Long unnoticed was the device of extending the limits of her concise verse by incorporating literary allusions, correspondences, and subtexts.

Akhmatova has bequeathed two masterpieces in verse. Requiem, immortalizing a mother's anguish over her son's imprisonment, reaches all peoples and times. The ten core poems are preceded by an epigraph and three introductory pieces, as if a work on imprisonment were difficult to commence. Once begun, the surge subsides but slowly, as evidenced by the ponderous bipartite Epilog. Lacking sequential narration, these poems of diverse rhythm shift their focus on the leitmotif of prison and suffering. Each poem has a different approach, as if grief had sent the mother's head reeling with her mind fixated to her loss. Religious overtones intensify with the mother's suffering. Trees that once murmured to her maintain silence in pain. With the son's sentencing, insanity hovers to obliterate memory, but, like death, it evades her. A picture of the Mother of Christ at the Crucifixion broadens the inexpressible sorrow: "And there, where the Mother silently stood,/No one even dared to glance." Even if things change, the persona vows to accept no monument to herself except beside the prison lest in blissful death she forget the suffering of millions. The poema's impactful content is offset by a melodious, folkish, subdued form.

Poem without a Hero. A Triptych is a complex, ciphered, densely structured narrative in verse whose many layers and possible interpretations contribute to its magnificent mystique. It is permeated with literary and biographical allusions. Like Pushkin in Eugene Onegin, Akhmatova invented her own strophe. Part 1, "1913. A Petersburg Tale," termed "a polemics with Blok" by Akhmatova herself, confines numerous authors within itself. It is based on a stylized recollection of the tragic suicide in 1913 of the young comet and poet Vsevolod Knyazev, out of love for Akhmatova's friend Olga Sudeikina, an actress who preferred the poet Blok. On New Year's Eve 1940 costumed shades from 1913, including the ones in the romantic triangle, visit the persona at her home. They are described enigmatically. Nothing is related; a re-creation is achieved through the Hoffmannesque visit of shades, masks, and a portrait stepping out of its frame which conjures up the final year before the cataclysm of 1914 as well as that before World War II. The second part, "Tails" (Reshka, as in "heads and tails"), claiming to illuminate the preceding, returns to the present to treat the fate of a writer's artistic freedom in the face of editorial philistinism; it parallels Pushkin's "Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet." Akhmatova provides a coded explanation for the obtuse editor unable to distinguish between the three persons in the triangle. Part 3, "Epilog," returns to postwar Leningrad with the poet's departure from Asia. A vessel for memory and culture, the poem memorializes a bygone era. Form, as important in the poem as content, is more accessible since the former is easily appreciated while the latter must be mined for comprehension. Through this work the poet conquers time and space.

Averchenko A.T.

Arkady Timofeevich Averchenko (1881 - 1925)

Russian writer-humorist, playwright, theatrical critic.

He was born on March 15, 1881 in Sevastopol in family of merchant. He was educated at home because of bad sight and poor health; he could not study in gymnasia. He read a lot and without distinction.

When he was fifteen years old A. Averchenko start to work as a junior scribe in a transport office. After one year he left Sevastopol and began to work as a clerk in the Bryansk coal mine where he served three years. In 1900 A. Averchenko moved to Kharkov.

In 1903 the Kharkov newspaper "The Southern Territory" published the first Averchenko's story "How I had to insure my life", in which his literary style was already shown. In 1906 Averchenko becomes the editor of the satirical magazine "The Bayonet", which was almost completely composed of his works. When this magazine was closed A. Averchenko heads the next magazine - "The Sword", which soon was closed also.

In 1907 A. Averchenko moves to St. Petersburg and contributes to the satirical magazine "The Dragonfly ", which was later transformed into "The Satiricon". Later he becomes the permanent editor of this popular magazine.

In 1910 three books were published , which made A. Averchenko known to all reading Russia: "Cheerful Oysters", "Stories (humorous)", the first book, "Speckle On A Wall", the second book. "... Their author can become Russian Mark Twain...", - acutely noticed V.Polonsky.

In 1912 books "Circles On Water" and "Stories For The Convalescent" won him a title "The King of Laughter".

A. Averchenko enthusiastically accepted the February revolution, but not the October revolution. In autumn 1918 he left for the south, and contributes to the newspapers "Priazovsky Territory" and "The South", appears with the reading his own stories, manages a literature department in "the House of the Actor". In the same time Averchenko writes the plays "The Remedy For Nonsense" and "The Play With Death", and in April 1920 he organized the theatre "The Migrant Birds Nest".

In half-year he emigrates through Constantinople abroad; since June 1922 Averchenko lived in Prague, from time to time leaving for Germany, Poland, Romania and the Baltic states. In that time were published his book "Dozen Knives in the Back of the Revolution", the collection of stories "Children" and "Ridiculous in the Horrible", the comic novel "the Joke of the Patron of Art" etc.

In 1924 Averchenko underwent an eye removal operation after which he could not recover for long time; soon the heart-disease grew progressively worse.

Averchenko died in the Prague City Hospital January 22, 1925. He is buried in the Olshansky cemetery in Prague.

Babel I.E.

Isaak Emmanuilovich Babel (1894-1941)

Short story writer and playwright who was a correspondent with the Red Army forces of Semyon Budyonny during the Russian civil war. Babel's fame is based on his stories of the Jews in Odessa and his novel Red Cavalry (1926). He was the first major Russian Jewish writer to write in Russian.

Isaak Babel was born in the Jewish ghetto of Odessa, Ukraine. Most of his early years he spent in the Black Sea port Nikolaev, 90 miles away. The atmosphere of the persecution of Jews is reflected in the pessimism of his stories, although his childhood was relatively comfortable. At a time when most Jews were forbidden to live in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev, and other localities, Odessa had many times more Jews than any other city in the Russian part of the empire. However, between 1881 and 1917 two million Jews left Russia, mostly for America. Babel's father was a successful businessman who installed his family in one of the best streets in Odessa. Babel studied violin, German, French, and Talmud at the Nicholas I Commercial Institute (1905-11) and wrote stories at the age of fifteen in imitation of Guy de Maupassant. In 1915 Babel graduated from Kiev University which had been evacuated to Saratov on the Volga because of the war.

After graduating Babel moved to St. Petersburg, where he studied literature. In that capital city "traitors, malcontents, whiners, and Jews" were banned and Babel had to use an apocryphal passport. His first works were published in 1916 in Letopis, a monthly edited by Maksim Gorky. Although Babel himself had been untouched during the pogroms that spread throughout Russia in 1905, he saw in rising revolutionary movements a promise of freedom, and end of all persecution. Babel's early satires of the Czarist bureaucracy attracted the attention of the government and Babel was accused of pornography and incitement of class hatred. This is seen in the loosely autobiographical 'Story of My Dovecote' he described the fate of a murdered grandfather. On Gorky's advise Babel decided to see the world and learn about life. He participated briefly in the war on the Romanian front. He was injured and after his discharge Babel joined the staff of Gorky's newspaper Novaya Zhizn. During the Revolution he worked probably as a clerk for the Commissariat of Education and for the CheKa, the Soviet Secret Police.

In 1919 Babel married Eugenia Gronfein and joined the Ukranian State Publishing House (1919-20). He was assigned then as a journalist to Field Marshall Budenny's First Cavalry army, witnessing its unsuccessful Polish campaign to carry Communist revolution outside Russia. The Reds penetrated almost to Warsaw but were driven back. In Odessa Babel started to write a series of stories set in the Odessan ghetto of Moldavanka, where he was born. "It was not before 1923," Babel recalled later, "that I learned to express my thoughts clearly and not too wordily. Then I went back to writing." Tales of Odessa appeared in book form in 1931. It depicted with broad strokes and humor the Jewish underworld, the middlemen, small merchants, brokers, whores, tough Jewish gangsters, saloon keepers, rabbis, and entrepreneurs, on the eve of Revolution. In the center of the colorful caricature of the ghetto is Benia Krik, the king of gangsters. The stories are entitled 'The King', 'How It Wad Done in Odessa', 'The Father', and Liuba the Cossack', where Benia Krik is absent. In the play Sunset (1928) Babel returned to the Odessa gangster world, but this time the protagonist was Benya's father, Mendel Krik. It did not gain success and also Marya (1935) attacted little attention.

In 1923 Babel started to publish a cycle of novels called Red Cavalry. Like Maupassant, Babel often surprises the reader with twists in the plot. In Red Cavalry basically a pacifist narrator, Liutov, who is a Jewish officer, is assigned to a regiment of traditionally anti-Semitic Cossacs. The joke was, as Jorge Luis Borges has stated, that "the mere idea of a Jew on horseback struck them as laughable, and the fact that Babel was a good horseman only added to their disdain and spite." In one tale, 'Zamosc,' the narrator falls asleep and his horse drags him to the front line of the battle. He wakes looking up at a Russian peasant, armed with a rifle, who tells him, "It's all the fault of those Yids." Out of the horror of battles, torture and murder Babel creates a rapidly cutting polyphonic tale of revolutionary change. Some stories are narrated in a stylized form of the Cossacks' own language. Two stories appeared in Mayakovsky's magazine LEF. The work was traslated into more than 20 languages, gaining Babel national fame, but it was also attacked by Budenny, who claimed that its emphasis on brutal acts insulted his troops. Babel was defended by Gorky.

From 1923 Babel lived in Moscow. His wife went in 1925 to Paris for a 'temporary' separation; his daughter Natalie was raised in France. Babel's mother and sister lived in Brussels from 1926 on, but the author himself did not leave the Soviet Union despite numerous opportunities. Babel visited his wife in Paris and travelled on journalistic assignments in Ukraine and the Caucasus. He served also as a secretary of a village soviet in Molodenovo. Between the yars 1925 and 1930 he wrote a series of fictionalized accounts of his childhood, and young manhood. In the loosely autobiographical 'Story of My Dovecote' he described the fate of a murdered grandfather.

In the beginning of the 1930s Babel's literary reputation was high in the Soviet Union and abroad. He revised his stories for his collected works that appeared in 1932 and 1936. From the mid-1930s Babel avoided publicity under increasing Stalinist persecution, although he worked on film scripts, including Eisenstein's banned Bezhin Meadow and on a new book.

Babel was arrested by the N.K.V.D., a precursor of the K.G.B, in May 1939 at his cottage in Peredelkino, the writers' colony. Under interrogation and probable torture at Lubyanka, Babel confessed a long association with Trotskyites and engaging in anti-soviet activity. His trial was held in Buturka Prison and on January 27, 1940, he was shot on Stalin's orders for espionage. The Soviet officials informed Babel's widow that her husband died on March 17, 1941 in a prison camp in Siberia. Babel's charges were posthumously cleared in 1954. His seized manuscripts have not been recovered. Babel's collected works, based on the 1936 edition but including new materials, were republished in 1957 and 1966.

Bely A.

Andrei Bely. Pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev, born on 26 October 1880 in Moscow. The duality which suffused much of Bely's work perhaps began in his childhood. His father, Nikolai Vasilevich Bugaev, a well-know mathematician at Moscow University, was autocratic and firmly committed to the natural sciences, while Bely's mother insisted--sometimes irrationally--on a dedication to the arts. The conflicts between his parents had an unfortunate effect on the psyche of their young son.

At age 15, Bely became acquainted with the family of Mikhail Solovyov, the younger brother of the famous philosopher Vladimir Solovyov. In the Solovyov home, Bely was exposed to a wide range of cultured guests and discussions of art. Bely himself described meetings at the Solovyov home "sessions of the Florence Academy".

In 1899, Bely graduated from the well-regarded private gymnasium of L.I Polivanov. He entered Moscow University and graduated in 1903 with a degree in natural sciences. In 1904 he enrolled in the university's historical-philological faculty, but soon gave up his studies and by 1906 he had decided to give himself fully to writing.

His writing career began in 1902 with the publication of his "Second Symphony, the Dramatic", under the pseudonym of Andrey Bely, which was suggested by Mikhail Solovyov. Bely was to publish three more "symphonies", "The Northern, or First--Heroic" (1904), "The Return--Third" (1905) and "Goblet of Blilzzards--Fourth" (1908). These "symphonies" were an attempt at a synthesis of word and music, using a system of leitmotifs, a rhythmyzation of prose and an application of the structural laws of music to a literary composition. These works were also influenced by Vladimir Solovyov's concept of "all-in-oneness". A recurring image in these symphonies is that of Sophia-Holy Wisdom and the Eternal Feminine.

Between 1901 and 1903 he fell in with a group of Moscow symbolists (including Bryusov and Balmont) associated with the publisher "Scorpion". In the autumn of 1903 Bely was one of the organizers of the Argonauts, who preached the ideas of symbolism as religious creation and the equality of the "text of life" with the "text of art". It was during this period that he published the poetry volume "Gold in Azure" (1904).

Shortly thereafter, however, Bely's philosophical orientation changed from Nietzsche and Solovyov to neo-Kantian. He viewed the revolutionary events of 1905 as anarchistic maximalism. During the same period, his poems began to take on social themes, Nekrasov rhythms and intonations, as shown in the volume "Ash" (1909), which Bely dedicated to Nekrasov.

Bely had a very difficult relationship with Blok and an unrequited love relationship with Blok's wife, Lyubov, whom Bely identified with the Holy Sophia, reflected in the poetry collection "Urn" (1909).

In 1910 and 1911, Bely published three volumes of critical and theoretical articles, "Symbolism" (1910), "Green Meadow" (1910), and "Arabeques" (1911). The novel "The Silver Dove" appeared in 1910. This latter work is the tale of a young poet who leaves the city to join a group of religious sectarians and ends up being murdered by them.

About this time, he also began a relationship with Asya Turgeneva. Between 1910 and 1912 they traveled through Sicily, Tunis, Egypt, and Palestine.

1913 saw the publication of his most influential novel, "Petersburg". Set in the imperial metropolis in the revolutionary year 1905, "Petersburg" centers around a plot to deliver a bomb to a high government official. The geometric precision of the city clashes with the forces of chaos swirling around, and the swamp on which the city is built threatens to rise up again.

Bely then fell under the sway of the anthroposophical teachings of Rudolph Steiner and by 1914 he was in Dornach, Switzerland, assisting in the construction of Steiner's Anthroposophical Temple. In 1914 and 1915 Bely was also working on the novel "Kotik Letaev", an autobiographical retelling of his childhood.

In 1916, during World War I, leaving Asya Turgeneva in Switzerland, Bely returned to Russia and somehow avoided military service. His reaction to the Revolution of 1917 was that it presented a possible way of avoiding global catastrophe. He worked as a librarian and archivist while also lecturing on literature and anthroposophical ideas. He also was a reader of manuscripts for Proletkult. Of notable interest from this period are his essay "Revolution and Culture" (1917) and the poem "Christ Has Risen" (1918).

In 1921, Bely returned to Europe, but had a falling out with both Steiner and Turgeneva. In 1922 he published "Recollections of Blok".

Bely returned to Russia in 1923 where he married Klavdiya Vasilieva and worked on his trilogy of Moscow novels: "The Moscow Eccentric" (1926), "Moscow Under Seige" (1926) and "Masks" (1931). He also completed three volumes of memoirs: "At the Border of Two Centuries" (1930), "The Beginning of the Century" (1933) and "Between Two Revolutions" (1934). "The Baptized Chinaman", a continuation of the Kotik Letaev story, appeared in 1927. Bely also produced literary studies such as "Rhythm as Dialectic in The Bronze Horseman" and "The Mastery of Gogol" (1934).

Bely died on 1 August 1934. In the autumn of 2000, Bely's apartment in Moscow at Arbat, 55, was opened as a public museum.

Belyaev A.R.

Alexander Romanovich Belyaev was born on March 16, 1884 in Smolensk. His father was a priest. As a child, he dreamed of wingless flight and liked to jump from roofs. One jump was from too great a height and resulted in a spinal injury.

In 1901 he graduated from the seminary, but, being an atheist, he had no desire to become a priest. Instead, he enrolled to study law at a lycee in Yaroslav while also studying violin. To pay for his education, he played in a circus orchestra and worked as a set decorator and a journalist. After graduation, he returned to Smolensk where he worked as a police inspector, then a music and theatre critic for the paper Smolensky Vestnik. He saved his money and, in 1913, managed to take a trip through Italy, France, and Switzerland. Upon his return to Smolensk, resumed journalistic work and became editor of Smolensky Vestnik.

In 1916, he began to suffer from a form of tuberculosis of vertebrae. In 1919 he was put in a cast and stayed in bed for three years. He used this time to study foreign languages, medicine, biology, history, engineering. From 1922 until his death, he wore an orthopedic corset. In 1922, on the advice of doctors, he moved to Yalta and worked at a state home for children.

In 1923, he settled in Moscow and became a legal adviser at the People's Commissariat of Education. This was also when his literary work began. In 1925 he became a full-time writer. His early stories appeared in the magazines Vokrug Sveta, Vsemirny Sledoput and Znaniye-Sila. His first work of science fiction was Professor Dowell's Head (1925), which he himself called an autobiographical story. In it, he wanted to show that "It is possible to feel the head without the body." Other works include Island of the Dead Ships, Man-Amphibian, and Above The Abyss. "The Struggle in Space" (1928) incorporates rocket-airships, radio-controlled tanks, and a Death Ray in a fight against evil American Capitalists you are trying to destroy the Pan-European and Pan-Asiatic Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

In 1931 he moved to Leningrad, then to its suburb - Pushkin. Subsequent works include Leap Into Nothing (1933), Air Ship (1934), and Second Moon (1935).

In all, Belyaev, who became known as the Soviet Jules Verne, authored more than 50 novels and novelettes and numerous short stories He maintained a relationship with Soviet rocket pioneer Konstantin Eduardovich Tsilokovsky and included in his novels Tsilokovsky's ideas for artificial Earth satellites, interplanetary platforms, and flights into outer space. In fact, Tsilokovsky's initials were used to name the planet in Beliayev's novel Planet KETS.

His last story, The Anatomic Bridegroom, appeared in the magazine Leningrad in 1941. He died a hungry, freezing death in Leningrad on 6 January 1942.

Bezymensky A.I.

Alexander Ilych Bezymensky, Russian poet, born on 19 January 1898 in Zhitomir, Ukraine. in 1916 he entered the Kiev Institute of Commerce. But the Revolution of 1917 changed his path. He became active in revolutionary events. His first poems were published in 1918, followed soon by the collections "October Dawns" (1920) and "To the Sun" (1921).

In the 1920s he was active in the RAPP organization, working on the staff of its journal "Na Postu". He also was an editor for the newspaper "Krasnaya Molodyozh". Many of his poems of this era are dedicated to the Komsomol, and one of them, "Molodaya Gvardiya" (Young Guard) (1922) was set to music and became the organization's anthem.

He also focuced on subjects of topical interest to his readers, for example; "About a Cap", "About Felt Boots", "How Life Smells", and of course "V.I. Lenin" and "Feliks".

During the Great Patriotic War he served as a reporter, accompanying troops from Moscow to Prague. His experiences during these years are reflected in his collection "Front Line Notebook".

Following the war, he continued to produce lyric, propagandistic, and satiric peoms, such as "Stronger Than The Atom Bomb".

A.I. Bezymensky died on 26 June 1973.

Blok A.A.

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok (1880 - 1921), poet and playwright, was born in a family of the gentry. His father, A L Blok,was a jurist, professor of Warsaw University, and a talented musician. His mother, A. A. Beketova, was a writer. His parents separated soon after his birth. Blok spent his childhood in the family of his grandfather A. N. Beketov, a botanist and Rector of Petersburg University, in Petersburg and the Beketov's estate Shakhmatovo, near Moscow. In 1889 Blok's mother obtained a formal divorce and married F. F. Kublitsky-Piottukh, an officer, whereupon she and her son moved to his apartment in an industrial section of Petersburg. Having graduated from a Gymnasium in 1898, Blok entered law school at Petersburg University, but transferred to its Historical-Philological Division in 1901, from which he graduated in 1906. In his early youth he had developed an interest in the theater (he played Hamlet, Romeo, and Chatsky in Griboedov's Woe from Wit) and intended to become an actor, but at 18 he began to write poetry seriously. In 1903 Blok married L. D. Mendeleeva, daughter of the famous chemist D. I. Mendeleev. This marriage, hardly successful in a conventional sense, proved important for Blok's inner development: L. D. Mendeleyeva inspired almost all of his early and much of his later verse. Blok's rapprochement to Andrei Bely, Sergei Solovyov, and other Symbolists occurred at the same time. In 1903 Blok's verses were first published in Novyi put', a journal edited by Dmitri Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Hippius.

In 1904 Blok's first book of verse appeared: Verses on a Beautiful Lady (Stikhi o Prekrasnoi Dame) was received with enthusiasm by the young symbolists. Blok's second book of verse, Inadvertent Joy (Nechayannaya radost', 1907), and his lyric drama The Fair Show Booth (Balaganchik), staged in 1906, made him famous. It was then that Blok became a professional man of letters, moving in the circles of the literary-philosophic intelligentsia and the theatrical Bohemia. His personal life and creativity were affected by his relations with the actress N. N. Volokhova (his cycles of verse, "Snow mask" [Snezhnaya maska], "Faina," and the play Song of Fate [Pesnya sud'by]) and the singer L. A. Del'mas (his cycle of verse, "Carmen"). Blok made several trips abroad, of which his journey to Italy in 1909 was particularly significant (his cycle "Italian Verses" and his series of essays, Lightning Flashes of Art [Molnii iskusstva]). His trip to Warsaw, occasioned by the death of his father in 1909, gave Blok the impulse for his verse epic Retribution (Vozmezdie, 1910-21). After the appearance of his books Land in Snow (Zemlya v snegu, 1907), Lyric Dramas (1908), Nocturnal Hours (Nochnye chasy, 1911), a three-volume collection of his poems (1911-12), the play Rose and Cross (Roza i krest, 1913), and the verse epic Garden of Nightingales (Solovlnyl sad, 1915) Blok's fame had spread all over Russia. He published many articles and gave many public lectures ("The People and the Intelligentsia" - Narod i intelligentsiya, 1908). In 1916 Blok edited and wrote an introduction to a collection of the poetry of A. Grigoriev, who influenced his late poetry in many ways.

Drafted in 1916, Blok was appointed, through the influence of friends, to serve as a record keeper with an engineering unit. He was stationed at the front near Pskov until March of 1917. He greeted the February Revolution with enthusiasm. Starting in May of 1917 he edited testimony given by former ministers of the Tsar before the Extraordinary Investigative Commission of the Provisional Government, which provided him with material for his book, The Last Days of the Old Regime (Poslednie dni starogo rezhima, 1919). The October Revolution initially also gave Blok much hope this article, "Intelligentsia and Revolution," 1918). He worked for Soviet institutions, participated in the publishing house Vsemirnaya literatura (World literature), the Bolshoi dramatic theatre, and the Vol'naya filosofskaya assotsiatsiya (Vollfila, Free Philosophic Association), which he helped to organize. In 1920 he was elected chairman of the Petrograd division of the All-Russian Union of Poets. Blok was close to the Left Social Revolutionaries' Party at the time. In February of 1919 he was briefly arrested in connection with the so-called "conspiracy of the Left SR's." The last two years of Blok's life were marked by his profound disappointment in the Revolution. Apathy, despair, hard living conditions, and a mysterious (possibly venereal) disease led to his mental illness and early death.

Blok's early poetry is linked to the traditions of Zhukovsky, Polonsky, Fet, as well as to the epigonic lyrics of the 19th century.

Blok's mature poetry (the poems of his "third volume," 1907-16), enriched by new accomplishments, returns to classical models. Blok now moves close to Pushkin, whose level of artistry he almost reaches. As before, motifs of heartache, despair, cosmic dissonance, and chaos (the cycle Terrible World - Strashnyi mir), the absurdity of human existence (a group of poems entitled Danse macabre - Plyaski smerti) stand out. The cycle Retribution contains some magnificent penitential verse ("Of valor, feats, and glory" - "O doblestyakh, o podvigakh, o slave", "The Commander's Steps" - Shagi Komandora). Blok now looks back to his second period as to a fall, a substitution of modern decadence for living and creative symbolism; ecstatic transcendence beyond the limits of the mundane turned to sin. An ever present memory of his earlier symbolic systems imparts a metapoetic character to Blok's poetry of this kind. A striving emerges to leave lyric isolation for more objective genres. The cycle Iambs (Yamby) is imbued with political and social themes. In Blok's Italian Verses a vivid sense of history, a picturesque plasticity, and lively narrative appear; here Blok achieves an unsurpassed harmony of composition, rhythm, and sound symbolism ("Ravenna"). His short poema "Garden of Nightingales" in many ways resembles his Italian Verses.

Blok had a huge influence on Russian poetry, including schools that were hostile to him, Acmeism and Futurism. Akhmatova and Mayakovsky learned from him directly. He has entered history as a poetic witness of great changes and cataclysms, as a poet who transformed the Russian poetic idiom, and as one of the most controversial and remarkable Russian writers, "a monument to the beginning of a century" (Anna Akhmatova).

Brodsky I.A.

Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky (1940 - 1996)

Russian-born poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987. After moving to the United States Brodsky wrote his poems in Russian and his prose works in English. As a poet Brodsky was largely traditional and classical. He dealt with moral, religious and historical themes, and often used mythological allusions.

Iosif Brodsky was born in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). His father was photographer. Brodsky studied at schools in Leningrad up to the age of 15 and started to write poetry from the late 1950s, earning a reputation as a free thinking writer. He taught himself Polish so he could read poetry that had never been translated into Russian. Brodsky also demonstrated considerable talent in rendering Russian translations of Donne and Marvell, and he read such Western authors as Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner through Polish translations.

As a young man, Brodsky worked at many occupations, including stoker and geologist-prospector. His production as a freelance poet and self-learned translator did not gain authorities approval, although he never directly criticized the government. His poetry appeared in samizdat (clandestine circulation) editions but were widely read. Brodsky's reputation made him a target for the secret police and he was convicted as a 'social parasite'. He spent some time in Kresty, the most famous prison in the Soviet Union. In the official record he was characterized to be 'less than one'. It became the title for Brodsky's collection of essays, which was published in 1986. Brodsky was sentenced to five years of hard labour, but the sentence was commuted in 1965 after protests by such prominent cultural figures as the composer Dmitri Shostakovich and the poet Anna Akhmatova, who was his close friend. During Brodsky's exile a collection of his poems was issued by an Ameican publisher in 1965.

In 1972 Brodsky was forced to exile from the USSR. He first went to Vienna, where he was helped by the poet W. H. Auden, and finally he emigrated to the United States. There worked as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Michigan, Queen College, City University of New York, Columbia University, New York University, Smith College, Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College. In 1977 he became a U.S. citizen and in 1991-92 he was America's Poet Laureate. He was a member of American Academy of Arts and Letters, but resigned in protest over the honorary membership of the Russian poet Evgenii Evtushenko in 1987 - he considered Evtushenko a party yes man. Brodsky died of heart attack on January 28, 1996, in New York. He was married with Maria Sozzani, he also had a son with Maria Basmanova. Brodsky's parents were not allowed to travel to the West to see him and they died in Leningrad. In his essays about his parents in Less Than One (1986) the author explained: ''I write this in English because I want to grant them a margin of freedom: the margin whose width depends on the number of those who may be willing to read this. I want Maria Volpert and Alexander Brodsky to acquire reality under 'a foreign code of conscience,' I want English verbs of motion to describe their movements. This won't resurrect them, but English grammar may at least prove to be a better escape route from the chimneys of the state crematorium than the Russian.''

Like several dissident Russian poets, Brodsky's intended his verse for recital rather than for silent reading. Existential problems are dealt in such poems as 'Isaak i Avraam' (1963), which was based on the Old Testament story, and 'Gorbunov i Gorchakov' (1965-68), in which Brodsky fills a madhouse conversation of two patients with references to literature and history. Later works reflected the poet's idea of the coming of a post-Christian era, during which the antagonism between good and evil is replaced by moral ambiguity. Other favorite themes were loss, suffering, exile, and old age. In his new home country Brodsky did not feel complete secure - disturbing visions penetrated into his mind also in peaceful Cape Cod: "in formal opposition, near and far, / lined up like print in a book about to close, / armies rehearsed their games in balanced rows / and cities all went dark as caviar." (from Lullaby of Cape Cod, 1975) He also recognized in the work of Robert Frost darker tones than his image as the "folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer" would suggest.
"Still, if sins are forgiven,
that is, if souls break even
with flesh elsewhere, this joint,
too, must be enjoyed
as afterlife's sweet parlor
where, in the clouded squalor,
saints and the ain'ts take five,
where I was first to arrive."
(from 'Cafe Trieste: San Franciso', to L.G.)

As an essayist Brodsky started in the 1970s, writing first in Russian, but he soon switched to English. Brodsky became a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, Partisan Review, and The Times Literary Supplement. He wrote mostly about literature, evaluating Auden 'the greatest mind of the twentieth century' and Osip Mandelshtam 'a poet of and for civilization.'. Language was for him a vehicle of civilization, superior to history, living longer than any state. Poems are a vehicle to restructure time - poets should keep language alive ''in the light of conscience and culture.'' Brodsky finished in his life time two collections of essays. Less Than one explored the works of Marina Tsvetayeva, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam, Auden, Derek Walcott, C.P. Cavafy, and Eugenio Montale. On Grief and Reason (1995) includes tributes to his favorite poets Frost, Hardy, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In one essay Brodsky notes that after the Great Patriotic War theatres showed Hollywood films - war booty from Germany - and Tarzan films influenced on the dissolving of the Stalin cult more than Nikita Khrushchev's speeches.

Budantsev S. F.

Born 28 November 1896, Old Style (10 December, New Style). He was the 11th son of an estate manager in Ryazan. After graduating from a private gymnasium in Ryazan in 1915, he enrolled in the historical-philological faculty of Moscow University. He fell in with a group of writers and artists including the likes of Khlebnikov, Aseev, Vera Ilina, N. Chernishev and E. Lisitsky. Upon reading Mayakovsky's Cloud in Trousers, Budantsev reports that he suddenly ceased being an epigone of Symbolism and turned into a propagandist for Mayakovsky.

Budantsev spent little if any time on his studies, preferring instead to churn out three poems a day. He and other imitators of Mayakovsky and Khlebnikov managed to wrest control of the journal Mlechnii Put away from some amateur "peoples' poets" and publish their works.

In spring of 1916, Budantsev was called up for military service. In September, he was sent to work as a quartermaster with Russian forces in Persia. In February 1918, he found himself in Enzel, Persia, where he aligned himself with the Revolutionary Committee, headed by I.O. Kolomiytsev. A Social-Revolutionary-turned-Bolshevik, Kolomiytsev was named the first Soviet representative to Teheran, and he invited Budantsev to join him there on the mission. Budantsev, however, was eager to return to Russian, so Kolomiytsev gave him a letter of introduction to the editor of the paper Izvestia of the Baku Soviet.

During the summer of 1918, Baku was in turmoil. German and Turkish forces threatened from the north. The Menshevik and Social-Revolutionary parties were engaged in anti-Soviet agitation, advocating that the English be invited into the city as protectors. Budantsev, who had first-hand knowledge of English activities in Persia, wrote a series of articles exposing the colonial aspirations of the British, their greedy desire to control the oil riches of the region, and their complete lack of concern for the indiginous people. Budantsev used several pseudonyms for these articles: A. Pridorogin, B. Vorozhbin, and P. Vladimirov.

After the counterrevolutionary coup in Baku, Budantsev and others, betrayed by Mensheviks, were arrested as they tried to sail out of the city. Budantsev's papers were confiscated and, in the confusion, this allowed him to blend in with a crowd of refugees and escape to Astrakhkan.

In Astrakhan, the military revolutionary committee assigned Budantsev and two others to organize a Red Army newspaper. Publication of this paper, Krasnii Voin, began in September 1918. Each edition of the paper carried at least one, and sometimes two or three articles by Budantsev.

While in Astrakhan, Budantsev stayed with some of Khelnikov's relatives. He tried to coax Khlebnikov to write for Krasnii Voin, but the poet proved unsuited to newspaper work. The paper published a few of his poems as well as the piece "October on the Neva."

During this time, Budantsev began writing poetry again, and had a few verses published in the literary journal Sirena.

In 1919, Budantsev was with the provisions committee of the 5th Army, chasing after Kolchak. By the beginning of 1920, however, he was back in Moscow, where he finally undertook writing as his full-time profession.

Budantsev's first novel, completed in 1922, was Komandarm ("Army Commander"), about a provincial revolt led by an unrepentant Social-Revolutionary in Astrakhan. The novel originally was named Myatezh ("Uprising"), but Dmitri Furmanov had also written a novel using that title. So the two writers flipped a coin, and Budantsev lost. The novel was written in a "chopped prose" (rublenaya proza) style which was in vogue in the early twenties. Some critics of the time saw a resemblance between Budantsev's work and that of Pilnyak, noting at the same time a greater tendency toward realism in Budantsev. The villain of Komandarm, the left Social-Revolutionary Kalabukhov, is effectively portrayed as a vainglorious poseur, spiritually empty, filled instead with a hatred of Soviet power. The positive heroes--the Bolsheviks Bolotov and Lysenko--however, come off looking rather superficial and made-to-order.

Budantsev sent a copy of this novel as well as volume of his short stories entitled Yaponskaya Duel ("Japanese Duel") to Maksim Gorky. Yaponskaya Duel takes up a favorite subject of the 1920s, the fate of the intellectual in the Revolution. The protagonist of this story, an eccentric bibliographer, cannot find his way in the new revolutionary society, so he gets his revenge by burning his life's work--a bibliographic collection of translations of western European poets into Russian. Other stories in this collection focus on the petty bourgeois and philistines trying to adopt to the new order. Typical examples of this theme are Moscovskiye Ugli ("Moscow Corners"), Tarakan ("Cockroach"), Vesenaya Pesnya ("Spring Song"), and Kaplya ("The Drop"). Striking portraits of businessmen-NEPmen can be found in the stories Ugli Padeniya ("Angles of Fall") and Otchii Dom ("Father's House").

In his subsequent works, Budantsev abandoned the chopped prose style in favor of straight realism. This is apparent in his second novel, Sarancha ("Locusts", 1927). The action takes place around a cotton-cleaning factory in a remote region of southern Azerbaijan near Persia. The area is threatened with an imminent attack of locusts. Local officials try to prepare for the attack, but swindlers--both in and out of official positions--defraud the government, leaving the region without resources or equipment with which to battle the locusts. As a result, calamity is unavoiable. A particularly memorable scene in the novel shows an army of women using shovels to squash the locust larvae while the men, wading ankle-deep through a sea of the writhing vermin, shovel them into pits and set them aflame. Part crime story, part natural-disaster tale, Sarancha also defends the importance of marriage and seems to advise against abortion. The novel is also curiously devoid of politics. One of the swindlers makes a passing comment to the effect that the Soviet government stole from the rich, so it's his turn to steal back now. But the swindlers are basically just crooks. They do not belong to any organization; they are not engaged in any nefarious plot to overthrow Soviet authority. They just want to get rich. The factory-director hero of the novel, an intellectual recently returned from Persia, is motivated not by any political ideas, but a simple desire to work and help others. And the local Communist, a Comrade Effendiev, does not preach politics. Rather, his is like a good civic official anywhere, looking out for the welfare of his people.

While Sarancha avoided political topics, the same cannot be said of some of the stories Budantsev wrote in the 1920s. In stories such as Forpost Indii ("Outpost of India", 1922), Lunnii Mesyats Ramazan (1925), and Zhena ("Wife", 1926), drawing upon his experience in Persia and Azerbaidjan, the author highlights the curelty and inhumanity of the British occupation of the region. Concerning these stories, in 1988 Soviet critic L. Polosina wrote:

Not getting distracted with the exotic, he [Budantsev] reflects real life, the class contradictions which he himself saw, the cruel politics of British imperialism, turning the country into its colony.

In Forpost Indii, a local Persian Bolshevik attempts to lead the oppressed workers in a rebellion against the colonialists. Betrayed, he dies a horrible death in prison at the insistence of the "cultured" English overlord, who also duplicitously despises the informer who helped him catch the Bolshevik.

Zhena ("Wife") tells the story of the four wives of a rich Uzbek in a remote village. The senior wife is dedicated to her husband and cruel toward the other wives, all of whom live a hard life with no rights. One of the younger wives, pregnant, dies as a result of being overworked. Another wife is drawn to the new life and new people symbolized by the railroad which is being built through the area. Her attempt at flight is stymied, but there remains hope for her future.

During the 1920s, Budantsev produced so many short stories and plays that in 1929 an edition of his collected works filled three volumes. Budantsev was active in literary circles, working for various newspapers and serving as head of the prose department of the state publishing house Goslitizdat. He hob-nobed with the likes of Zoshshenko, Leonov, Babel, Vs. Ivanov, and Konstantin Fedin. He had a particularly close friendship with Boris Pasternak.

In 1930, Budantsev again took up the topic of the intellectual in the new society. The story Dom S Vykhodom V Mir ("House With an Exit into the World", 1930) is about a construction engineer who decides to remain at a large factory construction site, far from his beloved Moscow. While he is impressed with the scope of the project and with the people selflessly working on it, he makes this decision not out of conviction, but rather because of the messy state of affairs in his own family.

In the 1930s, socialist construction became the main topic for most Soviet writers, including Budantsev. He wrote sketches about Dneprostroi, the electrification of the country, and the construction of the Moscow Metro. He composed a whole cycle of sketches on the Balakhan Paper Factory, one of the major construction projects of the first Five Year Plan. The topic informed his fiction as well. Rasskaz o Trude ("Story of Labor", 1932) tells the tale of a factory foreman for whom the interests of the factory are a matter of his personal proletarian honor. He cannot abide shoddy work and undertakes to redo faulty welding himself. He works for more than 24 hours straight in order not to fall behind schedule.

Budantsev's third novel, Pisatelnitsa ("Woman Writer") was completed in 1936. It is a novel about the life of a factory and a city, but also about the art of creation. The novel begins with a woman writer arriving at a factory to gather material for her next work. The narrative follows her every step and thought. As the characters of the heroes of her future novel come more into focus, we see the world view of the old woman writer herself changing. She feels drawn to these new people, comes to understand them, and--more than merely writing about them--she gets involved in their lives.

In 1940, Sergei Budantsev was unlawfully repressed. He was later rehabilitated. At the time of his death, Iunosha ("Youth"), a novel about a young man come to study in Moscow, remained unfinished.

Bulgakov M.A.

Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev, Ukraine, the eldest son of a theology professor at the Kiev Theological Academy. He attended First Kiev High School (1900-09) and studied then medicine at Kiev University (1909-16). From 1916 to 1918 he served as a doctor in front-line and district hospitals. These experiences he described in notes of a young doctor, 'Zapiski yunogo vracha' (1925-26).

Russian journalist, playwright, novelist, and short story writer, whose major work was the Gogolesque fantasy The Master and Margarita. In the story the Devil visits Stalinist Moscow to see if he can do some good. The book is considered a major Russian novel of the 20th century. It first appeared in savagely censored form in the Soviet journal Moskva in 1966-67. The work was suppressed because Bulgakov refused to make the changes reguired by the authorities. Although Bulgakov was still making changes to the text on his death bed, the novel was completed. A first Soviet edition was published in 1966-67. The fuller text appeared in 1973 and the revised full text in 1989.

Bulgakov also used satire and fantasy in his other works, among them the short story collection Diaboliad (1925).

The naked man pushed his way to the front, tapped with his nail on the bronze bonnet and said:

"Here, comrades, we have a remarkable character. A notorious harlot of the first half of the 19th century..."

The lady with the stomach turned purple, took her young daughter by the hand and quickly drew her away.

(from 'The Fire of the Khans')

In 1918-19 Bulgakov worked as a doctor in Kiev, and witnessed the German occupation and then the occupation by the Red Army. During these war years he suffered from a morphine addiction, but was helped by his first wife to win the addiction. In 1920 Bulgakov abandoned medicine in favor of a career as a writer. He organized in Vladikavkaz, Caucasus, a 'sub-department of the arts', wrote stories for newspapers and moved to Moscow in 1921. There he worked for the literary department of the People's Commissariat of Education, writing as a journalist for various groups and papers. His largely autobiographical novel BELAYA GVARDIYA (1925, full text 1966, The White Guard) was an account of the turbulent years between 1914 and 1921 as reflected in the lives of a White family in the Ukraine. Two parts of the work was published in the journal Rossiya, whch was closed before the third part could appear.

From 1925 Bulgakov was associated with the Moscow Arts Theatre. He wrote and staged many plays, which enjoyed great popularity. Bulgakov's criticism of the Soviet system was not swallowed by the authorities. The Heart of the Dog (written in 1925), a satire on Soviet life in the guise of science fiction, was condemned unpublishable. In the story 'Pokhozhdenia Chichikova' the protaginist of Gogol's Dead Souls was dropped in the middle of the Soviet Russia's New Economic Policy period of 1921-27. 'Diaboliad' (1925) portrayed a poor clerk in a gigantic bureaucracy, where he loses his identity and life. In 1928 Bulgakov had three plays running in three Moscow theatres, Zoya's Apartment, The Crimson Island, and The Days of the Turbins, dramatized from his novel The White Guard. It brought the author overnight success and became 'a new Seagull' for the new generation, although it also received hostile reviews for the sympathetic portrayal of White officers. Paradoxically, The White Guard was one of Stalin's favorite plays. It was banned in 1929, reinstated in 1932 but published only in 1955.

By 1930s Bulgakov's works were published rarely or not at all - Zoya's Apartment (1926), a play set in an atelier-bordello, was banned, as The Crimson Island (1928). Flight (1928), dealing with White fugitives leaving Russia, was banned before its premiere. In 1929 he wrote to Maxim Gorky: "All my plays have been banned; not a line of mine is being printed anywhere; I have no work ready, and not a kopeck of royalties is coming in from any source; not a single institution, not a single individual will reply to my applications..."

After writing a letter to Soviet government, requesting permission to emigrate, Bulgakov received a personal telephone call from Stalin and was employed as an assistant producer with the Moscow Arts Theatre. He adapted classics for the stage and during the late 1930s he was librettist and consultant at Bolshoi Theatre. However, Stalin's favour protected Bulgakov only from arrests and executions, but his writings remained unpublished. In Black Snow, a Theatrical Novel, Bulgakov described his love-hate relationship and took a revenge on Stanislavsky for the failure of his play A Cabal of Hypocrites, produced under the title Molière. In one scene Louis XIV, the Sun King, says: "Then hear this: my author is oppressed. He is frightened. I will show kindness to anyone who forewarns me of whatever danger imperils him... The ban is lifted. You may stage Tartuffe." The Last Days was performed first in 1943 under the title Pushkin.

Bulgakov was married three times: with Tatiana Nikolaevna Lappa (1913), Liubov Evgenevna Belozerskaia (1924), and Elena Sergeevna Shilovskaya (1932), who gave invaluable support to the author when he wrote The Master and Margarita and had his fits of paranoia. Bulgakov was writing Black Snow, his theatre novel, when he died in Moskow on March 10, 1940. It took until 1980s before all Bulgakov's works could be published in Russia. Bulgakov was considered decades an outsider and the most "un-Soviet" writer. Supernatural and occult attracted him, and he used sudden cuts into the fantastic and mockery. Although he was subjected to a number of restrictions as a writer, he survived attacks from the officials, when others were imprisoned and perished in the 'Gulag Archipelago'.

Bulychev K.

Bulychev, Kir. Pen name of Ivan Vsevolodovich Mozheiko, born on 18 October 1934 in Moscow. He graduated from the Moscow Teachers Training Institute of Foreign Languages in 1957. He then worked as a translator and correspondent in Burma from the Novosti Press Agency and the magazine Vokruz Sveta. In 1962 he finished graduate work at the USSR Institute of Oriental Studies. In 1981 he completed his doctural dissertation on "The Buddhist Sangha and the State in Burma".

A doctor of historial sciences, a winner of the State Prize of the USSR, and a member of the Geographical Society of the USSR, Bulychev started writing science fiction in 1965. Many of his works have been turned into live-action and animated films, and he was presented with prestigious Russian science fiction Aelita award in 1997.

His favorite works of science fiction are "Professor Doyle's Head" by A. Beliayev, "Plutonia" by Nikolai Orpuchev, and "Lost World" by Arthur Conan-Doyle. He is married to the artist Kipa Alekseevna Soshinskaya, who has illustrated many of his books. He is alive and well and living in Moscow.

Bunin I.A.

Ivan Alexeyevich Bunin (1870 - 1935)

Russian poet, short story writer, novelist who wrote of the decay of the Russian nobility and of peasant life. Bunin was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1933. He is considered one of the most important figures in Russian literature before the Revolution of 1917. Bunin gained fame chiefly for his prose works, although he wrote poetry throughout his creative life.

Ivan Bunin was born on his parents' estate near the village of Voronezh, central Russia. His father came from a long line of landed gentry - serf owners until emancipation. Bunin's grandfather was a prosperous landowner, who started to spent his property after the death of his young wife. What little was left, Bunin's father drank and played at card tables. By the turn of the century the family's fortune was nearly exhausted. In early childhood Bunin witnessed the increasing impoverishment of his family, who were ultimately completely ruined financially. Much of his childhood Bunin spent in the family estate in Oryol province, and became familiar with the life of the peasanrs. In 1881 he entered the public school in Yelets, but after five years he was forced to return home. His elder brother, who had studied at an university and had also sat in prison for political reasons, encouraged him to write and read Russian classics, Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, and others.

At the age of seventeen Bunin made his debut as a poet, when his poem appeared in a magazine in St. Petersburg. He continued to write poems and published in 1891 his first story, 'Derevenskiy eskiz' (Country Sketch) in N.K. Mikhailovsky's journal Russkoye bogatstvo. In 1889 he followed his brother to Kharkov, where he became a local government clerk. Bunin then took a job as an assistant editor of the newspaper Orlovskiy Vestnik, and worked as a librarian, and district-court statistician at Poltava. Bunin wrote short stories for various newspapers, and started a correspondence with Anton Chechov, becoming a close friend with him. Bunin was also loosely connected with Gorky's Znanie group. In 1894 Bunin had met Leo Tolstoy, whose works he admired, but he found impossible to follow the author's moral and sociopolitical ideas. In 1899 Bunin met Maxim Gorky, and dedicated his collection of poetry, Listopad (1901), for him.

From 1895 Bunin divided his time between St. Petersburg and Moscow. He traveled much, married in 1898 the daughter of an Greek revolutionary. By the turn of the century, Bunin had published over 100 poems. He gained fame with such stories as 'On the Farm,' 'The News From Home,' 'To the Edge of The World,' 'Antonov Apples', and 'The Gentleman from San Francisco' (1915), which depicts an American millionaire who cares only about making money. He dies in a luxury Italian hotel and is shipped home in the hold of a luxury liner. Several tales focused on the life of peasants and landowners, but after the revolution of 1905 Bunin's peasant themes became darker in tone. The author, who knew village life more closely than did the urban intellectuals, considered the folk ignorant, violent, and totally unfit to take a hand in government. Later he wrote about the Bolsheviks in his notebook Cursed Days: A Diary of Revolution: "What a terrible gallery of convicts!"

As a translator Bunin was highly regarded. He published in 1898 a translation of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Song of Hiawatha, for which he was awarded by the Russian Academy of Science the Pushkin Prize in 1903. Among Bunin's other translations were Lord Byron's Manfred and Cain, Tennyson's Lady Godiva, and works from Alfred de Musset, and François Coppée. In 1909 the Academy elected Bunin one of its twelve members.

After Bunin's first marriage ended, he married again in 1907. When he was 40, Bunin published his first full-length work, Derevnya (1910, The Village), which was composed of brief episodes in the Russian provinces at the time of the Revolution of 1905. The story, set in the author's birthplace, was about two peasant brothers - one a cruel drunk, the other a gentler, more sympathetic character. The Village made his famous in Russia. Bunin's realistic portrayal of village life destroyed the idealized picture of unspoiled peasants, and arose much controversy with its "characters sunk so far below the average of intelligence as to be scarcely human." Two years later appeared SUKHODOL (Dry Valley), a lament for the passing of gentry life and a veiled biography of Bunin's family.

In exile Bunin wrote only of Russia. Bunin's name had been mentioned several times in Nobel Prize speculations and the whole process had became a burden for the author. According to a story, Bunin was stopped in Berlin on his way to Stockholm to receive the award. Nobel winner or not, he was arrested by the Gestapo, interrogated - the excuse was jewel smuggling - and he had to drink a dose of castor oil. During World War II Bunin, who was a strong opponent of Nazism, remained in France and it is said he sheltered a Jew in his house at Grasse throughout the Occupation. Bunin died of a heart attack in a Paris attic flat on November 8, 1953. His projected trilogy, which began with Zhizn Arsenieva (1927-33, The Life of Arsenyev) was characterized by the Russian writer Konstantin Paustovski "neither a short novel, nor a novel, nor a long short story, but is of a genre yet unknown." The second part, Lika, was published in 1939. Bunin modified his views of the Soviet Union after World War II, and a five-volume selection of his work appeared in his native country.

Burlyuk D.D.

Burlyuk David Davidovich

1882, the Semirotovshina khutor of Kharkov province. - 1967, Long Island, USA

The poet, artist, one of founders of the Russian futurism

He was born on July 9, in the Semirotovshina khutor of the Kharkov province in the Cossack family. His father sold farm and worked as a manager in

different estates, therefore the family frequently moved from place to place, and Burlyuk studied in gymnasias of different cities: Sumy, Tambov and Tver.

Since he was ten years old Burlyuk had been interested in painting, in 1898-1899 he studied at Kazan and Odessa art schools. In 1902-1905 Burlyuk studied painting at the Munich Royal Academy of Arts. He participated in art exhibitions in Russia and abroad.

On his return to Russia, Burlyuk became close with the left artists and participated in art exhibitions. In 1909-1910 Burlyuk united the young poets and artists who repudiated aesthetics of symbolism. They searched for new ways to develop poetry and art. Later they will name themselves the futurists. About that time Burlyuk met Mayakovsky (since 1910 Burlyuk, as well as Mayakovsky, studied in the Moscow Art School) who named him "his real teacher".

Burlyuk's energy, his organizing abilities and initiative helped to establish a new poetic school. In the collection "Slap in the Face to Public Taste" (1912) he called to reject classical traditions (he proposed "to throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy from the Steamship of the Modernity"). Furious attacks on the collection followed, thus only increased interest to the new school.

In the same years Burlyuk lectured on the principles of futurism in poetry and cubism in painting. In 1914 Mayakovsky and Burlyuk were expelled from the art school "because of participation in public debates".

Burljuk believed: "True work of art can be compared to the accumulator from which energy of electric suggestions proceeds. Each work is marked, as in the theatrical act, with the determined hours for admiration and viewing. Many works contain stocks of aesthete - energy for long period".

Burlyuk's pictures and drawings are scattered all over the world in museums and private collections. "Father of the Russian futurism", Burljuk actively participated in performances of futurists and was their theorist, poet, artist and critic. V.V.Mayakovsky recollected: "My real teacher, Burlyuk made me a poet... He gave me 50 kopecks daily. So I could write without starving ".

During the First World War Burlyuk was not drafted to the front, since he did not have one eye. He lived in Moscow, published poetry, cooperated in newspapers and painted pictures.

During 1918-1920 he traveled over Ural, Siberia and the Far East.

In 1920 Burlyuk immigrated to Japan where he lived two years, studying culture of the East and continued to paint pictures.

In 1922 Burlyuk settled in the USA. Together with his wife Burlyuk published collections, brochures and magazines, which were distributed through friends mainly in the USSR. His memoirs about futurism and V.V.Mayakovsky have a great value. He continued to write and paint pictures and published magazine "Color and Rhyme ".

In 1956 Burlyuk visited the Soviet Union.

He died on January 15, 1967 in USA.

Chernyonok M. Ya.

Chernyonok, Mikhail Yakovlevich. Destined to become the "Siberian Simenon", one of the leading writers of detective fiction in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Chernyonok was born in 1931 in Siberia. He studied at and graduated from the Novosibirsk River Transport Technicum, after which he worked on ships up and down the Ob River for nearly twenty years as a navigator, then an inspector responsible for monitoring safety of ships and investigating accidents..

He began his writing career not with prose, but with reporting and observations, which were published in the oblast newspaper Krasnoye Znamye.

Needing help in caring for his two young children, Chernyonok moved to Tolguchin, east of Novosibirsk on the Inya River, where his parents and older sister were living. There he quickly found a job on the raion newspaper. And it was here, too, that he began his association with a life of crime, becoming a people's court chairman and penning his first documentary detective story Sledskviem Ustavleno ("Proven by Investigation"). This story, serialized in the local newspaper, was an immediate hit. The literary journal Sibirskiye Ogni reprinted the tale and hired Chernyonok for its staff.

Chernyonok continued to produce other works ("Kukherterin Diamonds" and "Under Mysterious Circumstances"), but still money was tight for him, his wife, and four children. Besides writing, Chernyonok helped out in the family garden, the produce of which helped augment the family income. But things improved vastly with the publication of Stavka Na Proigrysh ("Losing Bet"), published in Siberskiye Ogni in 1979. The proceeds from this novel of fraud, illegal speculation, icon forging and murder enabled Chernyonok to buy himself a Zhiguli car, which we was still driving as late as 2001. Also, he was made a member of the Writers' Union Artistic Council for Detective and Science Fiction Literature.

Chernyonok's style is in the tradition of the classic, "old-fashioned" detective or mystery fiction, focusing on intellectual challenges and puzzles and making sure that Soviet justice always prevails. As Chernyonok himself expresses it:

I want crime to be followed by punishment, so that people don't lose their faith in the triumph of justice, in the supremacy of moral laws over immorality.

Chernyonok is displeased with the direction Russian detective fiction has taken in post-Soviet times. He feels that there has been an extinguishing of energy, feeling, and emotion. Further, he says:

The majority of contemporary detective stories seem to me mechanical - although nowadays it's hard to find this ancient genre in its pure form. Basically, they write action books in which mountains of corpses pile up; but the mystery, and the unraveling of the mystery--that which makes the readers think, which impels them to creative thought - is absent.

Chernyonok has written a total of 21 novels, including Fartoviye Babocki ("Lucky Butterflies"), Devushka Ishchet Sponsora ("Girl in Search of a Sponsor"), Killeri Ne Stareiut ("Killers Don't Grow Old"), and Taina Starogo Kolodtsa ("Secret of the Old Well"). A ten-volume collection of his works was issued in 2000 by Mangazeya Publishers. And now, Chernyonok has decided to put his pen to rest and spend his time fishing and catching up on his reading, particularly Chekhov and another Siberian author who sometimes wrote about criminals--Vasily Shukshin.

Although Chernyonok has enjoyed a good life because of crime fiction, he notes:

Oh, if only you knew how happy I'd be if life no longer provided a basis for the creation of detective fiction.

Dudintsev V. D.

Dudintsev, Vladimir Dmitrievich Born on 29 July 1918 in Kupyansk, Kharkov oblast, Ukraine. Graduated from the Moscow Law Institute. Fought as a soldier in World War II; was wounded and demobilized and served out the rest of the war working in the military prosecutor's office in Siberia. His first work was published in 1933. In 1988, Dudintsev had this to say about his early work: "They had a half-polished quality. They all were created without the moral weight of a writer's soul, like almost all of Stalin-era literature."

It was only when he ran into geniune suffering that his work took wing. "The experience of life and practical work provided the necessary massage which led to the development of my soul", he said.

His 1956 novel "Not By Bread Alone" caused a sensation, unleashing both wild enthusiasm from readers and harsh criticism from officials, including Nikita Khrushchev himself. It tells the story of an inventor who struggles against the bureaucracy and self-servers in an attempt to aid the Soviet economy. Many Western media outlets trumpeted the negative aspects portrayed in the book. This dismayed Dudintsev, making him feel "as though my novel, a peaceable ship in foreign waters, had been seized by pirates and was flying the skull and crossbones." He did not deny portraying negative aspects of Soviet society, but he said:

We speak boldy and honestly about our deficiencies and our difficulties, because they are the birth pangs of a new world in which there is no injustice, a world the principals of which are being confirmed and marching to victory in my country."

The idea for the novel formed in his mind during the war. To a meeting of the Union of Writers he recalled:

"How I was lying in a trench and above me flew 40 of our planes and two German planes, how the Germans, one after another, shot down our pilots, and how the question occured to me: how was such a slaughter possible given the great numerical superiority of Soviet planes? And I was always searching for an answer, collecting material for the novel."

Nonetheless, he was broadly condemned at a rowdy meeting of the Union of Writers, at which Dudintsev himself fainted. For a long time afterward, he was shunned by almost all. He survived by loans and anonymous gifts. Scientists who had opposed Lysenko and were themselves shunned, made friends with Dudintsev.

He authored one work of science fiction, "A New Year's Fairy Tale" (1957). "White Clothes" (Beliye Odezhdi) was published in 1987, at the height of perestroika. In this latter work, the hero, Dezhkin, is, according to Dudintsev, "an agent of good sent into the camp of evil with the assignment of defeating them." His fight is clandestine, unlike that of Lopatkin, the hero of "Not By Bread Alone", who fought openly. The author explained the difference this way:

Years had passed between the writing of these two novels. And I understood that for the Lopatkins to win, they must become Dezhkins. That is, in a definite social situation, those people pursuing a socially significant goal require not only courage, but also the ability to correctly and sensibly carry on the battle. If Dezhkin spoke out publically in defense of the scientific discovery, the repressive machine, having gathered momentum, would simply smash him. If I had portrayed such a hero as overcoming the system, his victory would appear false and programmed by the will of the writer's mind, not dictated by genuine reality.

"White Clothes" also contains the idea of "parachutists", described by Dudintsev this way:

People thrown from the destroyed world into the conditions of Soviet reality. Entrepreneurs and egoists in their souls, they looked around and saw that here, too, it was possible to live if they accepted the new "rules of the game". And hiding their true nature they began to shout along with everyone else, "Long live the world revolution!" Masking their insincerity, they shouted louder and more expressively than others so that they quickly rose to the top, occupied leading posts and began to struggle for their own personal, comfortable lifestyle.

According to Dudintsev, this is why gray-haired academics supported Lysenko and gave the leadership the needed "scientific" conclusions; and this is why, says Dudintsev, "ministers built not what was needed by the people, but that which did not contradict their personal interests." To Dudintsev it is obvious that the ecological disasters around the Aral Sea, the Volga, and Lake Ladoga are the work of the "parachutists".

In the words of the author, "The fight against evil is inevitably accompanied with great losses. With my book I wanted to call people to be more energetic."

He died on 23 July 1998.

Ehrenburg I.G.

Ilya Grigorievich Ehrenburg (1891 - 1967)

Prolific Russian writer and journalist who played as a link between Soviet and Western intellectuals before and after the Cold War. From the 1930s to the 1960s Ehrenburg was one of the most visible Soviet figures, who spent the second half of his life as a respected messenger of the Soviet state. Without being a member of the Communist Party, he moved freely in foreign countries and held important cultural positions. Ehrenburg published poetry, short stories, travel books, essays, and several novels, which combined patriotism with cosmopolitanism. Ehrenburg adapted his writings to Soviet political demands and avoided conflicts, that destroyed many other writers and artist. "How can the folk in tropics dwelling,
Where roses in December grow
Where people hardly know the spelling
Of the words like 'blizzard' and 'ice floe,'
Where even azure, even pleasant,
Above the sails a silken sky,
Since time primordial to the present,
The selfsame summer soothing the eye.
How can they even for a twinkling,
In a slumber, or in daydream learn,
How can they have the slightest inkling
Of what it means for spring to yearn,
Or how in freezing winter vainly,
When dour despondency holds sway
To wait and wait until ungainly
And massive ice gets under way."

Ilya Ehrenburg was born in Kiev, Ukraine, in a middle-class Jewish family. When he was five his parents moved to Moscow, where his father operated a brewery. In his memoirs, People, Years, Life (1960-65), Ehrenburg tells that he was pampered in his childhood and it was a mere chance that he did not become a juvenile delinquent. He attended First Moscow gymnasium, but he was arrested in his early teens for revolutionary activities and excluded from the 6th grade. Among his close friends during these years was Nikolai Bukharin, the Russian revolutionary who was shot in 1938 during Stalin's terror. Ehrengburg was imprisoned for five months. After release he went to Poltava where his uncle lived. In 1908 Ehrenburg immigrated to Paris to avoid trial for revolutionary agitation. He spent much time in Left Bank cafés, met V.I. Lenin, who wanted to hear news from Moscow, and started to write poetry under the influence of Verlaine, Francis Jammes, and Konstantin Dmitrievich Balmont. His first collection of verse appeared in 1910. In France Ehrenburg's become friends with such legendary figures as Picasso, Apollinaire, Ferdinand Léger, who showed him drawings made in the trenches of WW I, and Modigliani.

During the war Ehrenburg was a war correspondent at the front. His anti-communist poem, 'Prayer for Russia', appeared in 1917. After returning to his home country, he lived in Kiev, where he worked as a teacher, Kharkov, Kerch, Feodossia, and Moscow. He also traveled to Georgia with Osip Mandel'shtam. Ehrenburg's The Stormy Life and Lazar Roitschwantz (1928) was a version of Jaroslav Ha ek's The Good Soldier of Svejk and Voltaire's Candide. The hero is a Jewish ghetto tailor who escapes from Russian anti-Semitism and whose adventures take him through a half a dozen countries and several prison. Lazar works as a rabbit breeder in Tula, rabbi in Frankfurt, police informer for Scotland Yard, film actor in Berlin, a starving pioneer in Palestine, and painter in Paris. Ehrenburg's satirizes among others the phoney artists of the Quartier Latin and the speculators in the Weimar Republic. He also viewed skeptically the era of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union. Zhizn i gibel Nikolaya Kurbova (1923) was about the downfall of a Soviet secret policeman and The Love of Jeanne Ney (1924) depicted a love affair between a Russian Communist and a French woman. Out of Chaos (1934) was an apologia for Socialist Realism, and in Ne perevodya dykhania (1935) the writer accepted the official Communist policy in economic and political matters.

From 1925 to 1945 Ehrenburg lived in Paris, working as a foreign editor of Soviet newspapers. At intervals he returned to the USSR. With the American director Lewis Milestone Ehrenburg composed in 1933 a screenplay for a film, based on one of his stories, but the film was never realized. When the International Writers Congress was held in Moscow in 1934, he opposed Gorky, who advocated the doctrine of Socialist realism.

During the Spanish Civil War Ehrenburg wrote for the Soviet newspaper Izvestiia. He met Ernest Hemingway in Madrid - according to Ehrenburg he was at that time young and thin. In 1941 he returned to Moscow and listened Stalin's radio speech after the Nazis had attacked the Soviet Union. Stalin was nervous, he drank water and called his listeners "brothers, sisters, friends". Ehrenburg worked as a war correspondent. His ambitious novel, The Fall of Paris (1941-42), depicted the decline of capitalist France. Ehrenburg's reputation made him a target of Goebbel's propaganda. As late as January 1945 Hitler claimed that Stalin's flunkey Ilya Ehrenburg manifests, that the people of Germany must be destroyed.

The Storm (1949) and The Ninth Wave (1951-52) reflected the atmosphere of the Cold War - Stalin himself defended against critics The Storm, in which a Soviet citizen falls in love with a French woman. In The Thaw (1954-56) Ehrenburg tested the boundaries of free speech in the relatively less rigid but short period starting in the mid-1950s. Ehrenburg's connections to the top of the Soviet political hierarchy were exceptionally good and just before Stalin's death rumors spread in Moscow that the writer Ilya Ehrenburg had been picked to deliver a petition to Stalin begging him to let Russia's Jews emigrate to Siberia. Behind the scenes, Stalin planned to launch another purge and use Jewish doctors and their absurdly invented "crimes" as an alibi.

Ehrenburg received the Stalin Price in 1942 and 1948, and the International Lenin Peace Prize in 1952. In 1946 he visited Canada and the United States, where John Steinbeck said to him, "if you spit in the mouth of a lion, it becomes tame." When newspapers and magazines stopped printing his writings in 1949, Ehrenburg sent a short letter to Stalin. The ban was lifted, and he continued his travels in different parts of the world. In China he was astonished by the discipline of the people. He met Pablo Neruda in 1954 in Chile, and in Japan he felt that Kipling's famous lines, "Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," are not only wrong but dangerous. Ehrenburg was the Vice President of World Peace Council (1950-67) and a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR from 1950. Ehrenburg died in Moscow on August 31, 1967. The last years of his life Ehrenburg devoted to his memoirs, People, Years, Life, which portrayed a number of famous writers and artists he had known. He also campaigned to have published works by writers who had earlier been politically condemned by the regime.

Esenin S.A.

Esenin Sergei Alexandrovich, Russian poet, born 3 October 1895 in the village of Konstantinovo in the Ryazan province. In 1899, he went to live with his maternal grandparents. When he was three and a half, his uncles put him on a horse with no saddle and set it galloping off. Young Sergei held on for dear life. He learned to swim in a similar fashion. They took him out in a boat, stripped him naked, and tossed him into the water. When he was eight, he would act as hunting dog for an uncle, swimming in the lake after ducks which had been shot. He began writing poetry when he was nine.

He finished primary school in 1909. Hoping to turn Sergei into a rural schoolteacher, his family sent him to a teachers seminary in the village of Spas-Klepki. Reportedly, he loved church servies and singing in the choir. And it was here that he got serious about poetry. Following the advice of a teacher, he set off for Moscow in March 1913 to pursue poetry.

In 1914 he married Anna Izryadnova, and they had a son in January of 1915. Izryanova describes Esenin as arrogant, proud, ambitious, and possessive. Soon, he abandoned the family and Moscow for Petrograd, which he saw as the real literary capital.

He was so nervous that he broke into a sweat when he first met Alexander Blok on 9 March 1915. Blok gave Esenin encouragement and help, calling him a "naturally gifted peasant poet". Esenin, in turn claims that he learned lyricism from Blok and Kliuev, and from Bely.

Esenin's first collection of poems, Radunitsa, was published in February 1916. His fame rose quickly, and he even read his poetry in the presence of the empress and her daughters, for which he received a gold watch and chain. Esenin's sympathies, however, were with the revolutionaries and he warmly greeted both the February and October revolutions. Somewhere around this time Esenin married a second time, to Zinaida Raikh.

In 1918, three more collections of his work were published: "The Infant Jesus", "Transfiguration", and "Rural Breviary". In March 1918, he moved to Moscow, and in May his daughter was born.

He considered 1919 the best time of his life. He was given control of a bookstore, a publishing concern, and The Stall of Pegasus, a bohemian literary cafe. At this time he formed the Imaginist literary movement wtih poets Anatoly Mariengof, Vadim Ahershenevich, and Riurik Ivnev. They proclaimed the primacy of "the image per se" and spoke of the image "devouring" meaning. Metaphors were referred to as "minor images". Esenin said:

"Just realize what a great thing Imaginism is! Words have become used up, like old coins, they have lost their primordial poetic power. We cannot create new words. Neologism and trans-sense language are nonsense. But we have found a means to revive dead words, expressing them in dazzling poetic images. This is what we Imaginists have created. We are the inventors of the new."

In 1918 or 1919, Esenin applied to join the Communist Party, but he was considered too individual and "alien to any and all discipline". In 1920 two more collections were published, "Treriadnitsa" and "Triptich". The second son is born in 1920. The collection "Hooligan's Confession" is published in 1921.

Despite his intensely social life, slowly, a sense of alienation and lonliness grew in him. In 1921 he notes, "Generally speaking, a lyric poet should not live long."

In November 1921, he met American dancer Isadora Duncan, 17 years his senior. They were married on 2 May 1922, and 10 May 1922, they set off for a tour of Europe and America. Traveling was difficult for Esenin, however, and the next month in Berlin, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He recovered, and after stopping off in Paris and Venice, he and Duncan set off for America. They arrived in New York on 1 October 1922.

They had a stormy and difficult time in the USA, which was not helped by Esenin's experience with bootleg liquor. He hated New York, saying it was so abominable as to invite suicide. He feared losing his spiritual sense of art. As his mental and physical health declined, he and Duncan returned to Paris. His struggles with drinking continued and one night, he smashed all the mirrors and woodwork in his room at the Crillon Hotel. Influential friends succeeded in freeing Esenin from the police, and Duncan moved him to a mental hospital. By 5 August 1923, they were back in Moscow. By the end of October, their relationship was over.

Esenin was bored and deeply depressed, suffering from alcoholism and hallucinations. Unable to find a spiritual anchor, he seemed to some as helpless as a two-year-old child. Although his marriage to Duncan was never officially dissolved, he married again to Galina Benislavskaya. His drinking continued. The only time he was sober was when he wrote. But he felt his writing skills waning. He said that he was beginning to write verse, not poetry.

In 1923 he published "Stikhi skandalista" (Verse of a Creator of Scandals), and in 1924, the "Tavern Moscow" collection appears. In 1925 he published "Song of the Great Campaign" and several collections, including "Soviet Rus" and "Land of the Soviets."

In early 1925 he went to Baku where he wrote his "Persian motifs" and "Anna Snegina". In June, he left Benislavskaya, sold the rights to his collected works to the State Publishing House, and married Sofia Tolstaya, Leo Tolstoy's granddaughter. A persecution mania grew in him as did his hallucinations, and he finally entered a clinic in November. He suddenly left the clinic on 21 December, resumed drinking, and set off for Leningrad. He took a room in the Hotel d'Angletrre, and hung himself from the water pipes in the icon corner on 28 December. He left a suicide poem written in his own blood:
"Good-bye, my friend, good-bye.
My dear one, you are in my breast.
This predestined parting
Promises a meeting ahead.
Good-bye, my friend, without hand, without word
No sorrow and no sadness in the brow.
In this life, dying is nothing new,
But living, of course, isn't novel either."

According to Anatoly Mariengof:

If Sergei decided to leave us, he must have somehow come to doubt his own creative powers. There could not be any other reason for his death, just as he had no other aim in life save his poems.

Fadeyev A.A.

Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev, Russian writer, born 24 December 1901 in Krimy on Volga, east of Tver. Father was a village teacher, his mother was a doctor's assistant. Family moved to Vilnius, Ufa, then to the Far East region of Ussuri in 1908. He went to the village school in Sarovka, near Iman close to the Manchurian border. In 1912 the family moved to Chuguevka, further south in the same region. In autumn of 1912 he entered the Commercial Academy in Vladivostok. In 1918, during the Japanese occupation of the region, he joined the Communist Party and became active in the Bolshevik underground. In the spring of 1919, he left the academy without taking his final exams and joined the partisans east of Vladivostok. He saw action at Khabarovsk and Spassk and was wounded. He then joined the Red Army. In spring 1921, he went to Moscow as a delegate to the 10th All-Russian Party Congress. Later, he took part in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion and was again wounded. He was demobilized and entered the Academy of Mines in Moscow. But in 1924 he left the Academy and went south to Kradnodar and Rostov-on-Don for Party and journalistic work, mainly for the Rostov paper "Soviet South". He also helped establish the literary journal Lava. In 1926 he returned to Moscow and continued his political work for the Writers' Association. In 1937 he visited Spain during the Civil War. During the Great Patriotic War (World War II), he wrote reports and sketches from the front for Pravda and Izvestiya. At the end of the war he resumed political activities, visiting Britain in 1947, Iceland and Poland in 1949, and Czechoslovakia and Austria in 1951. He won two Orders of Lenin, was one of the leaders of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), and served on the editorial boards of several literary journals. In 1934 he was elected to the Presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers, and was General Secretary of the organization from 1946 to 1954. In 1939 he became a member of the Party's Central Committee.

His first published work, Against the Current appeared in Molodaya Gvariya in 1923. In 1934 this piece was revised and renamed The Birth of the Amgunsky Regiment. It is a story of partisans and Red Army troops in the Far East in 1920. The Flood (1924) is set in the taiga between the February and October Revolutions of 1917. The Rout (1927) is based on the author's own experiences with partisans in 1919 when they were forced to retreat deep into the taiga. He authored a manifesto piece, The Highway of Proletarian Literature in 1928. Parts of this is second novel, The Last of the Udege, an attempt at a broad treatment of the Civil War in the Far East, appeared between 1929 and 1940, but it was never completed. The tale Earthquake appeared in 1939 and his war sketches, Leningrad During the Siege came out in 1944. His third novel, The Young Guard (1945) was based on the heroic exploits of young Communist underground workers in the Donbass town of Krasnodon during the Nazi occupation, and it won Fadeev a Stalin Prize. Another novel, Black Mettallurgy, intended to show the triumphs of socialist labor, also never reached completion.

In his last years he suffered from kidney disorder, neuritis, alcoholism, and depression. During a period of sobriety on 13 May 1956, he committed suicide. His bitter suicide note, clearly revealing his disallusionment with the Party and Stalin, was "arrested" by the KGB at the time of his death and was not released until 34 years later, in the era of perestroika and glasnost. In the note, he wrote:

"It is impossible for me to live any further since the art to which I have given my life has been destroyed by the self-confident, ignorant leadership of the Party and can no longer be corrected. The best cadres of literature--in number far more than the tsarist satraps could even dream--have been physically exterminated or have died with the criminal connivance of those in power.

Literature, the highest fruit of the new order, has been debased, persecuted, and destroyed. The complacency of the nouveau riche to the great teachings of Lenin--even while they swear allegiance to these teachings--has led to my complete distrust of them. From them we can expect worse than from Stalin--he at least was educated, these new ones are ignoramuses.

My life as a writer loses all meaning. I leave this life with great joy, seeing it as a deliverance from a foul existence, where meanness, lies, and slander rain down on you. My last hope was to tell all this to the people who lead the government, but in the course of three years, despite my requests, they have not been able to receive me.

I ask to be buried next to my mother."

Fedin K.A.

Konstantin Alexandrovich Fedin, born 24 February (12 February, Old Style) 1892 in Saratov. His father was a merchant, running a stationary store. At a young age, in addition to attending school, Fedin began to learn the violin. In 1901, he entered the Commercial Academy. In 1905, together with his entire class, he participated in a student's strike. In 1907, he ran off to Moscow where he pawned his violin. His father, however, tracked him down and dragged him home. He made another attempt to escape--in a boat along the Volga--but this plot was foiled, too.

Rather then go to work in his father's store, Fedin continued his studies at the Commercial Academy in Kozlov. It was here that he developed a love of literature and started writing. His first story, written in 1910, was Sluchai c Vasiliem Porfirevichem ("Incident with Vasily Porfirevich"), an imitation of Gogol's Overcoat.

In 1911, he went on to study economics at the Moscow Commercial Institute. He continued writing and in 1913 his first published work, Melochi ("Trifles") appeared in the Petersburg journal New Satirycon. Upon seeing his words in print for the first time, Fedin recalls being so happy that he skipped and sang.

In 1919, Fedin moved to the town of Syzran, where he worked as editor and writer for the newspaper Syzran Communar. He didn't stay there for long, however. In the autumn of 1919 he was mobilized and sent to the Petrograd front during Yudenich's attack. He was assigned first to a calvary division, then transfered to serve as assistant editor of the paper Fighting Pravda. From 1921 to 1924, he served as editor of the magazine Books and Revolution. During this time, he continued writing articles and stories and was closely associated with the Serapion Brothers, a literary goup dedicated to the inividual freedom of the creative act. Later Soviet critics were hostile to the Serapion Brothers, and Fedin tried to distance himself from the group, saying he saw the need to break with them thanks to the influence of Maxim Gorky. Fedin wrote:

After meeting Gorky, I can't explain what was happening with me. In my soul, I recited an unending monologue. This was a feeling of liberation. It seemed that I had broken out of a narrow, almost impassable confine onto a vast open space; that now was the time to scratch away the scabs of the past, to purifiy myself; that I had won a special right to creation--of course, pure, real creation; that I would have to defend this right, but that I, of course, would defend it because my helpmate was Gorky. Yes, I mentally called him this: my helpmate and liberator.

In assessing the work of Fedin at the time, Maxim Gorky wrote:

Konstantin Fedin is a serious and intense writer, who works carefully. He is one of those who does not hurry to speak, but who knows how to speak well.

Fedin's first collection, Pustyr ("Wasteland") appeared in 1923. It included the story Sad (Orchard), the tale of an old gardener who watches sadly as the orchard he cared for and the manor house of the old owners are turned over to a Soviet orphanage and fall into neglect. In the end, the gardener sets the house and orchard on fire. This work won Fedin the first prize from the House of Writers.

In 1924, Fedin finished his masterful novel Goroda i Gody ("Cities and Years"), one of the first Soviet novels, portraying the path of the intelligentisa during the Revolution and Civil War. It was also a work of stylistic and structural novelties. In the novel, a spineless Russian intellectual, Andrei Startsov, is interred in Germany at the start of World War I. He falls in love with a German girl, Mari, who helps him in an escape attempt. He is perceptive in his observations of the cruelty and contradictions of German militarism, and back in Russia after the war, he struggles to find his place in Revolutionary society. He wants to join the new exciting world, but is frozen by his intellectual detachment and proves unable to make any contribution, to take any action. He was, in short: ...a man who, with anguish, waited for life to accept him. To his very last moment, he took not a single step, but waited for the wind to bring him to the shore he hoped to reach.

Forgetting his promises to send for Mari, Andrei drifts into another affair and gets another girl pregnant. He also helps a personal acquaintance, now a counterrevolutionary, escape Soviet justice. He has a chance to turn in this enemy of the people, but fearing that he himself would have a man's blood--even a guilty man's blood--on his hand, he fails to take action. For this betrayal of the Soviet cause, his best friend kills Andrei.

In 1926, Fedin retired to a village in the Smolensk region. There he wrote Transvaal, the story of a cruel Estonian of Boer extraction who comes to wield almost dicatorial power over the peasants of his village. Some critics disliked the story, seeing in it a defense of kulaks.

Fedin's next novel, Bratya ("Brothers"), appeared in 1928. This novel--again employing temporal displacements--is the story of musician and composer who attempts to claim an expemption from Revolutionary service in pursuit of his individual artistic expression. He argues with his brother, a Bolshevik who goes off to die in battle. In the end, the musician takes up his brother's cause and believes, therefore, that he has overcome the contradiction between art and Revolutionary activity. However, his view of art as essentially tragic, born in solitude, remains unchanged.

In 1934, Fedin was elected to the board of the Writer's Union. During World War II, he worked as a war correspondent, but also found time to produce the play Ispytaniye Chuvstv ("Test of Feelings") (1942). This play depicts a heroine, Aglaia, involved with the anti-German resistance.

Fedin returned to novels and undertook a triology consisting of Perviye Radosti ("First Joys") (1946), Neobyknovennoye Leto ("No Ordinary Summer") (1948), and Koster ("The Bonfire") (1961), offering a chronicle of Russian life between 1910 and 1941. The first of these, First Joys, is a broad, realistic novel set in Saratov on the Volga on the eve of World War I. It shows the actions of a young, budding revolutionary (Izvekov) and an older revolutionary factory worker (Ragozin), as well as various other strata of pre-revolutionary Russia. No Ordinary Summer begins in 1919 when a Russian soldier escapes from a German prisoner of war camp and makes it back to Russia, which is caught up in the Civil War. Also returning are Izvekov and Ragozin, who meet up with old friends and enemies. As Aleksei Tolstoy did in his novel Bread, here Fedin alters history somewhat to make Stalin, not Trotsky, the hero of the Battle of Tsaritsyn. The novel also features a nonpolitical writer trying to maintain his artistic freedom and express his sympathies for the suffering, no matter what side they are on. And in the third book of the trilogy, The Bonfire, a positive hero rushes to the defense of the motherland when the Nazis invade Russia.

In commenting on The Bonfire, Fedin noted that, throughout his career, he strove to not only to create characters who were, in their own way, heroes of their time, but also to protray the character of that time itself. He wrote:

My constant goal has been to find the image of the time and to include the time in the narrative on equal footing with, and even given preference over the heroes of the story.

Fedin produced some portraits of his friends and contemporaries in Pisatel, Iskusstvo, Vremya ("Writer, Art, Time") (1957). He received two Stalin Prizes, in 1948 and in 1950. He served as head of the Soviet Writers Union from 1959 to 1971 and, in this capacity, denied publication to Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward in 1968. From 1971 until 1977 Fedin worked on the editorial board of Novy Mir. He was married and had one daughter.

Konstantin Fedin died in Moscow on 15 July 1977.

Forsh O.A.

Olga Dmitrieva Forsh, Russian prose writer, born on 28 May 1873 in the Gunib fortress in Dagestan in the family of General D. Komarov, administrator of the Middle Dagestan district. Her mother died early, and her father married her governess. Upon the death of the general, however, her stepmother deposited Olga in a Moscow orphanage.

Forsh studied painting and drawing in Kiev and Odessa and under the direction of P. Chestyakov at the Academy of Arts. Her first publication was the story There Was A General, which appeared in the magazine Russkaya Mysl in 1908. This was followed, in the same year, by The Bear Panfamil, After The Firebird, and Pioneer.

Prior to the October Revolution, Forsh worked in Tsarskoye Selo as a drawing instructor. Soon after the Revolution, she moved to Moscow and worked in the School Reform office. The experiences of this time formed the basis for her later book Moscow Stories.

She eventually moved to Petrograd and, in 1923, began writing historical fiction. Her first work, Dressed in Stone (1925), is a tale of a 19th-century revolutionary who became a "secret prisoner", locked by the tsar in solitary confinement for 20 years. Contemporaries (1926), follows the fates of Gogol and the painter A.A. Ivanov. In the 1930s, she completed her Radishchev trilogy: Jacobin Ferment (1932), A Landed Lady of Kazan (1934), and Fateful Book (1939). The era of Paul I and the architects V. Bazhenov and A. Voronikhin are portrayed in Mikhalovsky Castle (1946). Her last major novel is Firstborn of Freedom (1953), a treatment of the Decembrist uprising.

She also wrote several volumes of fictionalized reminiscences: Hot Shop (1926) concerns the revolutionary workers and soldiers of 1905-1907; Mad Ship (aka "Ship of Fools") (1931) describes life in Petrograd's House of Arts in the 1920s; and The Raven (1933) deals with the Petersburg intelligentsia of an earlier time.

Forsh also wrote many satirical short stories, novellas, plays, filmscripts, and children's stories.

She died in 1961.

Furmanov D. A.

Furmanov, Dmitry Andreyevich. Born in 7 November (New Style) 1891, the third of seven children in Serenda (later renamed Furmanov), Kostroma province. His father was a tavern keeper. In 1897, the family moved to Ivanovo-Voznesensk. In 1905, he entered the town's commercial academy. In 1909, he went on to secondary school in Kineshma, on the Volga. In 1912, he enrolled in the University of Moscow, where he studied literature. In November 1914, he became a nurse in the army, serving on both the Caucaus and Turkish fronts. Then, in 1915, he was transferred to Kiev.

In October 1916, he returned to Ivanovo-Voznesensk and worked as a teacher for workers. After the October Revolution, he first supported the Social Revolutionaries and the anarchists before joining the Bolsheviks in July 1918. He became a member of the party's provincial executive committee. In 1919 he left for Sarama to join the Fourth Army. He was appointed political commissar of the 25th Infantry Division, led by Chapaev. In August 1919 he was transferred to the Turkestan front and assumed overall responsibility for political work. He served in Tashkent, Ferny (Alma-Ata) and the Kuban, where he was wounded and awarded the Order of the Red Banner. In 1921 he returned to Moscow to engage in political and editorial work. In 1923 he joined the "October" group of writers and was made political editor in the State Publishing House. One of his assignments there was to oversee the publication of Babel's Red Calvary Stories.

In March 1924, Furmanov became Secretary of the Moscow Association of Proletarian Writers. In March 1926 he contracted meningitis and died. He is buried in Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.

His first published work was a poem "In Memory of D.D. Efremov", which appeared in an Ivano-Voznesensk newspaper in 1912. In 1916 a series of sketches from the front appeared in "Russkoye Slovo". "Red Landing" (Krasny Desant), a story about a Red Army operation against Wrangle's forces, appeared in 1923.

Furmanov's most famous novel, "Chapaev" (1923), is a chronical of events surrounding Vasili Ivanovich Chapaev's exploits during the civil war. Chapaev, as a Soviet hero, is not quite "politically correct". He believes that the international solidarity of workers is a myth. He has no idea of how a collective farm would work. His grand economic strategy is to seize 100 cows from the rich and give one cow to each of 100 peasants. He's a member of the Communist Party but has never read the Party platform and has no comprehension of what's in it. He is disdianfully dismissive of all "staffs" and the intelligentsia in general.

Chapaev is, however, a man of action much admired by the peasants. He is a great battle tactician and knows well how to motivate the troops...albeit sometimes through brutal measures. And although most of the time he talks nonsense, he is portrayed as having a constructive effect since he preaches industriousness and rails against greed, sloth, and wreckers of all kinds.

In the novel, Chapaev is accompanied by his faithful political commisar, Fyodor Klichkov, a stand-in for Furmanov himself, who served as commissar to the real-life Chapaev. Together with the Red Army, they battle across Siberia, turning the tide against the Whites, forcing Kolchak out of Ufa and the Cossacks out of Uralsk. Along the way Chapaev dances, sings, and flies into countless rages. Throughout it all, Klichkov remains calm, waits for Chapaev to cool down, then manipulates him to the proper political position.

The novel is a mix of journalism and literature. Perhaps today we would call it a "docu-drama". It is uneven in quality and shows signs of having been written in a hurry. This is not surprising, seeing as it was drawn from Furmanov's own battlefield notebooks. Furmanov admitted that there was a certain "chaos" in the construction of the book, even "contradictions". But, he said, this arose not so much from his inability to connect everything artistically, but from the basic chaotic nature of the Civil War itself. Perhaps the best description of Furmanov's goal for this work comes from the narrator of the novel who says:

"In our sketch we make no pretension to a complete narration of events, or to a strict observance of sequence or absolute accuracy in dates, places and names. We limit ourselves to a picture of the life that was born of the times and was characteristic of the times."

That character of the times, Chapaev the loveable brute, became a folk hero in Soviet culture. A movie was make in 19xx based on the novel, and countless Chapaev jokes arose. (The Chapaev joke is, perhaps, second in popularity only to the Sterlitz joke). And now there is even a Chapaev video game, "Vasili Ivanovich and Petka Save the Galaxy".

Furmanov's next novel, "The Revolt" ("Myatezh"), is another civil war tale, this time set in Turkestan. It was completed in 1924 and published in 1925. Two collections of Furmanov's sketches and stories--"The Path of Struggle" and "Shtark" also came out in 1925. The novel "The Writers", reflecting the complex ideological struggle in Soviet literary circles at the time, remained unfinished at Furmanov's death. Other collections of his sketches and tales include "Seashores", "Unforgettable Days", and "The Blind Poet".

Gaidar A. P.

Gaidar, Arkady Petrovich. (Real family name, Golikov.) Born 22 Jan (9 Jan, Old Style) 1904 in the town of Lgov, Kursk guberniya, Ukraine, into the family of a teacher. He had three sisters, Natasha (b. 1905), Olga (b. 1908), and Katya. Although not yet members of the party, Arkady's parents--Pytor and Natalya Golikov--assisted the Bolsheviks in hiding caches of illegal literature.

In 1908, the family moved to Nizhni-Novgorod. To help with the family finances, Arkady's mother became a midwife-doctor's assistant. In 1912, when Arkday was 8 years old, the family moved to Arzamas.

When World War I began and his father was drafted into the army, the young Arkady ran away from home and tried to join his father at the front. Four days and ninety kilometers later, he was apprehended and returned home.

Back in school, he listed his favorite activity as "books". First among the authors he admired was Gogol, followed by Pushkin, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Pisarev, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and Mark Twain.

After the February 1917 Revolution, Arkady's father, still in the army, was elected a regimental commissar, and then later a divisional commissar. He spent the entire Civil War at the various fronts. Arkady himself was also drawn to the Bolsheviks and helped the local Arzamas organization as a type of intelligence agent, gathering information on the streets and passing it on to the Party committee. On 29 August 1918, Arkady became an official member of the Party. In December 1918 he enlisted in the Red Army "to fight for the shining kingdom of socialism."

Arkady was sent to a school for Red commanders, but before studies could be completed, he and other students were pulled out of school and sent off to fight the various bands warring throughout Ukraine. On 27 August 1919, the commander of Arkady's company was killed, and Arkady, only 15 years old, was promoted to replace him. In December 1919, now a platoon commander on the Polish front, Arkady received a shrapnel wound to the leg. He was sent home on leave, where he contracted typhus. Around this time, his mother became a member of the Party, and his father w