Jasienski, Bruno

(also Viktor Iakovlevich Iasen’skii). Born July 17, 1901, in the village of Klimontov, Sandomir District, Radom Province, in what is now Poland; died Oct. 20, 1941. Polish and Soviet Russian writer.

The son of a doctor, Jasieński graduated from the University of Kraków in 1922. His poetry was first published in 1918; he became a leading representative of Polish proletarian poetry. In 1925, Jasieński emigrated to Paris, where he joined the French Communist Party. He published the polemical novel I Am Burning Paris in 1928.

In 1929, Jasieñski moved to the USSR, where he began writing in Russian; his works included The Mannequins’ Ball (1931), a play that was a grotesque, and A Man Changes His Skin (parts 1–2, 1932–33), a novel that dealt with the class struggle in Ta-dzhikistan. Jasieñski’s antifascist novel The Conspiracy of the Indifferent was not completed; Part 1 was published in 1956.