Nickolai
Tikhonov was born in St Petersburg on 4th December, 1896. He fought
in the Russian
Army during
the First World War. After the October
Revolution he joined the Red Army and
fought against the Whites during the Civil
War.
Tikhonov
began writing poetry and 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. Members included Mikhail
Slonimski, 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.
Tikhonov
published his first collection of poems, The
Horde, in 1922. This was followed by The
Quest for a Hero (1924). Influenced by the work of Boris
Pasternak, Tikhonov developed an obscure style in which he used
modernist stylistic devices and complex rhymes.
The Serapions
insisted on the right to create a literature that was independent
of political ideology. This brought them into conflict with the Soviet
government and resulted in them having difficulty getting their work
published. Tikhonov broke with the Serapion
Brothers and another volume of poems, The
Shade of a Friend, appeared in 1936.
Leningrad Tales followed in 1943.
The winner
of three Orders of Lenin and three Stalin Prizes, Tikhonov became
President of the Soviet Writers' Union
in 1944. He was removed in 1946 as part of the purge organized by
Andrey Zhdanov.
Tikhonov
work continued to be published and At the
Second World Peace Conference appeared in 1951. His popularity
with the Soviet government was retained by his attacks on the writer,
Boris Pasternak. Nickolai Tikhonov
died on 8th February, 1979.
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