Granin, Daniil

(pseudonym of D. A. German). Born Jan. 1, 1919, in the village of Volyn’, in present-day Kursk Oblast. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU since 1942.

Granin graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1940 and worked at the Kirov Plant. From there he went to the front and fought until the end of the war in the tank troops. In 1945 he began working in the Leningrad Regional Administration of Power System Management and Scientific Research Institute.

He began publishing in 1949. The main theme of Granin’s works is the romance and poetry of scientific and technological creativity and the struggle between searching, principled, genuine scientists imbued with the communist ideological context and untalented people, careerists, and bureaucrats (the novels The Searchers, 1954, and I Am Going Into a Storm, 1962). The novel After the Wedding (1958) is about the experience of a young inventor sent by the Komsomol to work in the countryside. All three novels were staged and made into films.

His other works include the short stories and tales “The Triumph of Engineer Korsakov” (published in 1949 under the title “Dispute Across the Ocean”), “The Second Alternative” (1949), “Iaroslav Dombrovskii” (1951), and “His Own Opinion” (1956); books of essays on trips to the German Democratic Republic, France, Cuba, Australia, and Britain (Unexpected Morning, 1962, and Footnotes to a Guidebook, 1967; the short story “The House at Fontanka” (1967); the tale Our Battalion Commander; and Two Faces, reflections on A. S. Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman (1968). Granin was awarded three orders and medals.