Malashkin, Sergei Ivanovich

Malashkin, Sergei Ivanovich 

Born July 3(15), 1888, in the village of Khomiakovo, in present-day Dankov Raion, Lipetsk Oblast. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU (1906).

Malashkin was the son of poor peasants. He took part in the Russian Revolution of 1905-07 and the October Revolution of 1917. His first verse collections were Muscles (1918) and Mutinies (1920). The novels and stories that brought him fame, Two Wars and Two Worlds (book 1, 1927), Memoirs of Ananii Zhmurkin (1927), and EvlampiiZavalishin’s Composition on the People’s Comissar and Our Time (1928), are pointed in subject and describe life in different strata of Russian society in pre and post-revolutionary times. Some of Malashkin’s works written in the 1920’s (The Sick Man, 1926, and Moon on the Right Side, or Unusual Love, 1926) and devoted to the ugly aspects of life during the new economic policy period provoked a stormy dispute in the press; Malashkin was criticized for deviating from artistic truth and overemphasizing the darker side of life.

Malashkin has also written novels about the Civil War of 1918-20 and the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45, namely, Girls (1956), Winging Across the Land (1963), Petrograd (1968), and Battle in the Fields of Muscovy (1972), and the short story collection Two Armored Trains (1958). He has been awarded two orders and a number of medals.

WORKS

Khronika odnoi zhizni. Foreword by Iu. Rozenblium. Lipetsk, 1962.
Chetvert’ veka: Povesti i rasskazy. Moscow, 1970.

REFERENCES

Petelin, V. “Khronika odnoi zhizni.” In Rossiia—liubov’ moia. Moscow, 1972.
Drobyshev, V. “Minuvshee menia ob”emlet zhivo.” Molodaia gvardiia, 1969, no. 7.

A. I. ELISEEV