Ivan Le

(pseudonym of I. L. Moisia). Born Mar. 10 (22), 1895, in Moisentsy, now in Cherkassy Oblast. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1925.

As a youth Le worked as a hired hand and as a miner. He participated in the February Revolution of 1917 and the Great October Revolution in Petrograd and in the Civil War of 1918–20 in the Ukraine. Le began publishing his work in 1924. The collections of short stories Iukhim Kudria (1927) and Belly Dance (1928) were about the emergence of a Soviet way of life. His first major work, Intermontane Novel (1929–34), is about Soviet Uzbekistan, where he lived and worked for some time.

In the 1930’s, Le wrote the novella Integral (1931), set in the Donbas, and short stories about the life of a kolkhoz and the revolutionary struggle of workers in capitalist countries. The novel Story of Joy (1938) and the cycle of short stories Sviatogory (1938) are devoted to the spiritual and civic growth of the Soviet woman.

During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Le published the collection of short stories My Letters (1945); later he returned to the events of the heroic years in the novel Southwest (with A. Levada, 1950), At the Edge of the Precipice (1958), and the novella The Maple Leaf (1960).

Le first wrote about the history of the Ukraine (the novel Nalivaiko, 1940) in the prewar years. After the war historical themes dominated his works. The epic novel Khmel’nitskii (T. G. Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR, 1967) appeared in 1957–65. His works have been translated into many languages. He was awarded the Order of Lenin, eight other orders, and various medals.