Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov

Ivanov, Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich (1895–1963), one of the first Soviet dramatists. He began writing while in the army and in 1920, with the help of Gorky, settled in Leningrad. His first play, Armoured Train 14–69, was an adaptation of one of his own novels, dealing with the capture of a trainload of ammunition during the Civil War. Produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1927 with Kachalov in the lead, it was the first successful Soviet play and now has a permanent place in the Russian repertory. A later play about events in the Far East, The Doves See the Cruisers Departing (1938), also had some success. His plays on more remote history included Twelve Youths from a Snuffbox (1936), on the assassination of Tsar Paul I, and Lomonosov (1953), on the ‘father’ of Russian science.

Vsevolod Vyacheslavovich Ivanov , 1895-1963, Russian short-story writer, novelist, and dramatist, b. Siberia. Ivanov had an adventurous early life as a sailor, circus performer, fakir, and partisan fighter. His talent for vivid description and ironic point of view was discovered and encouraged by Gorky. The novel Armoured Train 14-69 (1922, tr. 1933), based on an episode of Soviet expansion in Siberia, is considered the most important of his many works. A long, semiautobiographical novel, The Adventures of a Fakir, was translated in abridged form in 1935. His later work includes Saga of the Sergeant (tr. 1952).