Mikhail
Slonimski was born in Russia in 1897. He
began writing short stories in the early 1920s and show the strong
influence of Yevgeni Zamyatin.
In 1922
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 Konstantin Fedin. Russia's
most important writer of the period, Maxim
Gorky, also sympathized with the group's views.
Slonimski's
story, Emery's Machine, about
the future of Communism, was published in 1923. This was followed
by the novel, The Lavrovs (1926), about the problems that intellectuals
were having in finding a place in Soviet society.
Other novels
by Slonimski include Sredni Prospect
(1928), about the New Economic Policy and
Foma Kleshnyov (1931).
After the
Second World War Slonimski wrote First
Years (1949), a revision of
The Lavrovs. He attempted to correct the ideological
errors of the work by placing the emphasis on the February
Revolution to the October Revolution.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
