Jilemnicky, Petr

Jilemnický, Petr 

Born Mar. 18, 1901, in Kysperk; died May 19, 1949, in Moscow. Slovak writer; People’s Artist of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (1949; posthumously). Member of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia from 1921.

Jilemnický lived in the USSR from 1926 to 1928 and studied at the Moscow Institute of Journalism in 1927–28. He was interned in a concentration camp from 1942 to 1945 for his participation in the antifascist struggle. Jilemnicky was cultural attache in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic embassy in Moscow in 1948–49. His cycle of social novels—including The Unplowed Field (1932) and The Compass Inside Us (1937)—played a great role in the development of socialist realist literature in Czechoslovakia. His novel The Chronicle (1947; Russian translation, 1948) is an ode to the heroism of the Slovak uprising of 1944.

WORKS

Spisy, vols. 1–10. Bratislava, 1951–57.
In Russian translation:
Kusok sakharu: Roman. Moscow, 1950.
Pole nevspakhannoe: Roman. Moscow, 1955.

REFERENCES

Bogdanov, Iu. V. “Petr Ilemnitskii.” In Istoriia slovatskoi literatury. Moscow, 1970.
Truhlář; Bř. P. JilemnickÝ: Spisovatel’—bojovník, vols. 1–2. Bratislava, 1955–58.

IU. V. BOGDANOV