Leberekht, Gans

(Hans Leberecht). Born Nov. 18 (Dec. 1), 1910, in St. Petersburg; died Nov. 10, 1960, in Tallinn. Soviet Estonian writer. Member of the CPSU since 1945. Son of a worker; an industrial laborer. From 1935 to 1937, Leberecht studied at the M. Gorky Leningrad Evening University of Literature. He wrote his works both in Estonian and Russian. During the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45 he fought in the ranks of the Estonian Corps of the Soviet Army.

Leberecht’s novella Light in Koordi (1948; State Prize of the USSR, 1949), about the beginnings of the conversion of the Estonian peasantry to collective forms of labor, played an important role in the establishment of socialist realism in Estonian literature. Leberecht is the author of the novels Captains (1954), The Soldiers Come Home (1956), and The Palaces of the Vassars (1960) and the novella In One House (1957). He was awarded two orders and several medals.