Konstantin
Fedin was born in Saratov, Russia on 12th
February, 1892. He joined the Russian
Army during
the First World War and after being captured
he was imprisoned in Germany.
In 1918
Fedin was released and after arriving back in Russia joined the Red
Army and fought during the Civil War.
His first story, The Orchard,
was published in 1920.
In 1922
Fedin helped form the literary group, the Serapion
Brothers. Inspired by the work of Yevgeni
Zamyatin, the group took their name from the story by E. T. Hoffmann,
the Serapion Brothers, about an
individualist who vows to devote himself to a free, imaginative and
non-conformist art. Other members included Nickolai
Tikhonov, Mikhail Zoshchenko,
Victor Shklovsky, Vsevolod
Ivanov and Mikhail Slonimski. Russia's
most important writer of the period, Maxim
Gorky, also sympathized with the group's views.
Fedin's
controversial novel, Cities and Years,
tells the story of an intellectual who originally welcomes the October
Revolution but later becomes disillusioned and is eventually murdered
by a German Bolshevik. The novel upset
supporters of the Soviet government and Fedin was accused of being
sympathetic to the book's hero.
The short
story, Transvaal
(1928) about the kulaks and the
novel The Brothers (1928), that
once again deals with the problems of an intellectual adapting to
Communist society, were unpopular with pro-Bolshevik critics.
After the
Second World War Fedin's began to conform to
the requirements of Socialist Realism.
First Joys (1946) and An
Unusual Summer (1948), were highly praised in both the
Soviet Union and the rest of Europe.
In 1959
Fedin was elected President of the Soviet
Writers' Union. A post he held until 1971 when he was elected
chairman of the executive board. Konstantin Fedin died in Moscow on
15th July, 1977.
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