Writer Boris Polevoy's 95th Birth Anniversary to be Marked

The 95th anniversary of the birth of prominent Soviet writer Boris Polevoy is to be marked on Monday.

Polevoy (his real name and surname are Boris Kampov) was born in Moscow in a lawyer's family. In 1913, his family moved to Tver. Having finished a secondary school and an industrial junior college, Boris worked at the Proletarka textile factory in Tver.

The craving for journalism appeared early in the young man. Back in 1922, being a sixth former, he published his first report in Tverskaya Pravda. From 1924, his notes and reports were regularly published in the Tver newspapers.

In 1928, he gave up the job at the factory and began his professional journalistic career. The first book of feature stories by the young author Lousy Man's Memories about the life of the people "at the bottom" was published in Tver in 1927. It is his only publication signed with the name of B. Kampov. His pseudonym Polevoy came into being as a result of the proposal by an editor to translate his family name Kampov from Latin into Russian ("campus" means a field in Latin).

Polevoy's first story A Hot Department about the people's work to fulfil the first five-year plan was published in 1939.

During the Great Patriotic War, Polevoy was in the army in the field as a correspondent of the Pravda newspaper. His frontline impressions and meetings formed the basis of his books From Belgorod to the Carpathians, We Are Soviet People, and Gold.

Polevoy figures in the history of Soviet literature first of all as the author of the famous Story of a True Man based on the real biography of military flyer Alexei Maresyev (Meresyev in the book). Having lost two feet in the war, he proved to be strong and determined enough to return to aviation and continued to fight successfully, having become Hero of the Soviet Union.

The year of 1949 saw the publishing of his story He Returned. The cycle of short stories Contemporaries came into being from the records made at the construction of the Volga-Don canal.

In 1958, Polevoy published his novel The Deep Rear about the selfless work of the Kalinin residents during the Great Patriotic War.

The genre of travel notes - American Diaries, On the Other End of the World, and 30,000 Lis Across New China - figures prominently in Polevoy's creative activity.

Polevoy travelled much around our country as a correspondent of the national newspapers. These trips resulted in diaries - feature stories The Angara Records and the Sayan Records. The novel On a Wild Bank was based on documentary feature stories.

Literature and journalism are only some aspects of the activity of Hero of the Socialist Labour and Winner of State Prizes Polevoy. He was a prominent public figure, who carried out great literary-organisational work, and was a high-placed official in the Soviet Writers' Union.

From 1962 to 1981 Polevoy was the editor-in-chief of the Yunost magazine for young people. The monthly became a "ruler of men's minds" of the 1960s generation. A circle of authors many of whom hold a prominent place in the Soviet and Russian literature shaped up around Yunost.