Kirshon, Vladimir Mikhailovich

Kirshon, Vladimir Mikhailovich (vlədyē`mĭr mēkhī`ləvĭch kērshôn`), 1902–38, Russian dramatist. He began his career with Red Dust (1927, tr. 1930), a play showing the degeneration of a revolutionist under the reconstruction program known as the New Economic Policy. His play Bread (1930, tr. 1934) deals with the struggle against private hoarding on collective farms. The majority of his plays concerned the social problems of the new order. Kirshon was expelled from the Communist party in 1937 because of his leading role in the suspect Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

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Kirshon, Vladimir Mikhailovich 

Born Aug. 6 (19), 1902, in Nal’chik; died July 28, 1938. Soviet Russian playwright. Became a member of the CPSU in 1920. Participant in the Civil War of 1918–20.

Kirshon graduated from the la. M. Sverdlov Communist University in Moscow in 1923. He was one of the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) and the All-Union Society of Associations of Proletarian Writers (VOAPP). His plays, which include Konstantin Terekhin (Red Rust; coauthor, A. Uspenskii, 1927), The Rails Are Humming (1928), The City of Winds (1929), Bread (1930), The Trial (1933), The Miraculous Alloy (1934), and The Great Day (1936), are distinguished by their topicality and keen awareness of social problems. The principal characters of his plays represent the new leader—a staunch Bolshevik-Leninist. Kirshon’s works have been translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR and into foreign languages.

WORKS

Dramaticheskie proizvedeniia. Moscow, 1957.
Izbrannoe. Moscow, 1958.
Stat’i i rechi o dramaturgii, teatre i kino. P’esy V. M. Kirshona na stsene. Vospominaniia o V. M. Kirshone. Moscow, 1962.
O literature i iskusstve: Stat’i i vystupleniia. Moscow, 1967. (Bibliography.)

REFERENCES

Lunacharskii, A. V. Sobr. soch. v 8 tt, vol. 2, Moscow, 1964, pp. 544–51; vol. 3, Moscow, 1964, pp. 433–38.
“Gor’kii i sovetskie pisateli: Neizdannaia perepiska.” In Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vol. 70, Moscow, 1963.
Tamashin, L. Vladimir Kirshon: Ocherk tvorchestva. Moscow, 1965.

E. A. POLOTSKAIA