Mikhail Leonidovich Slonimskii

Born July 21 (Aug. 2), 1897, in St. Petersburg; died Oct. 8, 1972, in Leningrad. Soviet Russian writer.

Slonimskii studied in the faculty of history and philology at the University of Petrograd. His first book. Sixth Infantry Regiment (1922), was a collection of short stories about World War I (1914–18). The novel The Lavrovs (1926; 2nd ed., 1953) portrayed a young intellectual who was won over to the side of the revolution. The novel Foma Kleshnev (1930) depicted the reeducation of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia during the Soviet period. The same theme was dealt with in Slonimskii’s most important work, the trilogy consisting of Engineers (1950), Friends (1954), and Contemporaries (1959), devoted to the formation of the Soviet technical intelligentsia during the first years of Soviet power.

In his early works, Slonimskii used a style that was showy and permeated with metaphors; the style of his later works was concise and realistic. Slonimskii was awarded three orders and several medals.