Leonid Pervomayskiy

Leonid Pervomaisky with his wife Evdokia. Krasnograd in the Kharkiv region, 1927.

Leonid Pervomayskiy (Ukrainian: Леонід Соломонович Первомайський, birth name: Ilya Shlyomovich (Solomonovich) Gurevich) (4/17 May 1908 – 9 December 1973), was a Jewish-Ukrainian Soviet poet, a winner of the 1946 Stalin Prize for literature and a member of the Communist party since 1954.

Pervomayskiy was born in Konstantinograd (now Krasnohrad, Kharkiv region of Ukraine) to the family of a bookbinder. He worked in a factory, then at a library and a newspaper. During 1941-1945, he was a military reporter. After the World War II, he published a novel in verse called "Brother's Youth" (Молодість брата, 1947) and numerous collections of poetry.

In 1946 he was awarded Stalin Prize of second degree for collections of poetry «День народження» ("The Birthday") and «Земля» ("The Land"). Later, he had been criticized by the Communist Party for the so-called "ideological errors".

Pervomaysky died on 9 December 1973. He was buried in Kiev at the Baikove Cemetery.^[1]

He was a recipient of a number of military and civil decorations.

References[]

• Сайт письменника at Leonid Pervomajskij.net.
• Тексти Леоніда Первомайського та про нього
• К.: Головна редакція Української Радянської Енциклопедії (1981); Київ: За редакцією А. В. Кудрицкого; 736 с., іл.