Iurii Krymov

(pseudonym of I. S. Beklemishev). Born Jan. 6 (19), 1908, in St. Petersburg; died Sept. 20, 1941; buried near the village of Bogodukhovka, now in Chernobai Raion, Cherkassy Oblast, Ukrainian SSR. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1941. Born into a literary family.

Krymov graduated from the department of physics and mathematics at Moscow State University in 1930. He worked in the Caspian shipyards and the Moscow Petroleum Institute, and in 1936 he sailed on the tanker Profintern in the Caspian Sea. Krymov’s major work is the novella The Tanker Derbent (1938; the play written with N. Otten, 1939; the film, 1941). It is one of the best works of Soviet prose of the 1930’s, accurately and forcefully depicting the birth of socialist competition and the growth of a rank-and-file party member who becomes a talented leader of the people. Krymov also wrote the novella The Engineer (1941), the short story “Exploit” (published in 1961 in the collection Pages From Tarusa), and essays written at the front. He was killed at the front.