Author. Considered one of the leading Soviet authors of the 1920's. His best work deals with guerilla warfare in Asiatic Russia after the 1917 Revolution, written in a vivid, exciting, colorful style. The novella "Armored Train 14-69" (1922), about a band of Red partisans laying siege to a White Guard locomotive in Mongolia, is viewed as his greatest achievement. It was adapted into a hit play that remained in the repertory of the Moscow Art Theatre for 70 years. Ivanov was born in a remote village near the border of Siberia and Turkestan. He ran away from home at 14 and led a picaresque life as a clown in a circus, a sword-swallower in county fairs, an itinerant salesman, and a manual laborer. In 1917 he joined the Red Army and fought in southeastern Russia, where the Civil War was particularly brutal. He later noted, "I have travelled the road of death and my only joy is that I am still alive". By 1921 he was in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and a member of Yevgeny Zamyatin's famous literary group, "The Serapion Brothers". Ivanov's early collections of short stories and novellas, "Partisans" (1921), "Colored Winds" (1922), "Skyblue Sands" (1923), "The Child" (1924), and "Exotic Tales" (1925), established him as a pioneer of Soviet prose. His descriptions of physical sensations are so intense that Zamyatin once joked, "Ivanov writes with his nostrils". With the rise of Stalinism in the 1930's Ivanov was bullied into writing according to the demands of Socialist Realism, which made his work flat and pedestrian. Of his later books only the unfinished autobiographical chronicle "Adventures of a Fakir" (1935) has merit.
Author. Considered one of the leading Soviet authors of the 1920's. His best work deals with guerilla warfare in Asiatic Russia after the 1917 Revolution, written in a vivid, exciting, colorful style. The novella "Armored Train 14-69" (1922), about a band of Red partisans laying siege to a White Guard locomotive in Mongolia, is viewed as his greatest achievement. It was adapted into a hit play that remained in the repertory of the Moscow Art Theatre for 70 years. Ivanov was born in a remote village near the border of Siberia and Turkestan. He ran away from home at 14 and led a picaresque life as a clown in a circus, a sword-swallower in county fairs, an itinerant salesman, and a manual laborer. In 1917 he joined the Red Army and fought in southeastern Russia, where the Civil War was particularly brutal. He later noted, "I have travelled the road of death and my only joy is that I am still alive". By 1921 he was in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) and a member of Yevgeny Zamyatin's famous literary group, "The Serapion Brothers". Ivanov's early collections of short stories and novellas, "Partisans" (1921), "Colored Winds" (1922), "Skyblue Sands" (1923), "The Child" (1924), and "Exotic Tales" (1925), established him as a pioneer of Soviet prose. His descriptions of physical sensations are so intense that Zamyatin once joked, "Ivanov writes with his nostrils". With the rise of Stalinism in the 1930's Ivanov was bullied into writing according to the demands of Socialist Realism, which made his work flat and pedestrian. Of his later books only the unfinished autobiographical chronicle "Adventures of a Fakir" (1935) has merit.
Bio by: Bobb Edwards
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