Valentin Kataev

Valentin Kataev (Odesa, 1897 – Moscow, 1986) was a Russian and Soviet novelist, playwright, poet and journalist. He wrote in Russian, and his work spans the revolution, the civil war and the Stalin years. He matters because he managed to write critically about post-revolutionary society without fully submitting to the demands of official Soviet style.

He was the son of a schoolteacher and of a woman from a minor noble family from Poltava, and he lost his mother when he was seven. He published his first poems in 1910, while still a teenager in Odesa, and fought in the First World War. His role during the civil war is unclear, and accounts of it differ. After settling in Moscow in 1922 he worked for the satirical magazine Gudok. His first novel, The Embezzlers (1926), follows two bureaucrats who try to defraud the Soviet state, and it was warmly received. Its satire carries the influence of Gogol. Time, Forward! (1932) describes workers rushing to build the steel plant at Magnitogorsk. A White Sail Gleams (1936) recalls the 1905 revolution through the eyes of two schoolboys in Odesa, and it inspired a film version in 1937.

In the 1950s and 1960s he edited the magazine Yunost, which gave room to young poets such as Yevtushenko and Akhmadulina. Around 1966 he moved partly away from socialist realism and began writing fragmentary autobiographical prose. The Grass of Oblivion, published that year, is considered by many critics the summary of his career. His legacy lies in a light, precise prose that influenced later Soviet writers.