Kochetov, Vsevolod Anisimovich

Born Jan. 22 (Feb. 4), 1912, in Novgorod; died Nov. 4, 1973, in Moscow. Soviet Russian author. Member of the CPSU since 1944.

Kochetov graduated from an agricultural technicum (1931). He worked as a shipbuilder and an agronomist. During the Great Patriotic War (1941-45) he worked for newspapers on the Leningrad front. He was the editor in chief of Literaturnaia gazeta (1955-59) and the magazine Oktiabr’ (1961-73). His works began to be published in 1934. The novellas On the Nevsky Ruins (1946) and The Suburb (1947) are about the events of the Great Patriotic War. Post war village life is the subject of the novella For Whom the Sun Shines (1949; new variant, Professor Maiborodov, 1961) and the novel Under the Homeland Sky (1950; new variant, Comrade Agronomist, 1961). Kochetov’s novel The Zhurbins (1952; the film The Big Family was made from the novel in 1954), portrays the life of three generations of a working family and is one of Soviet literature’s significant works about the working class. The novels The Ershov Brothers (1958), Secretary of the Oblast Committee (1961; a film by the same name was made in 1964), Angle of Fall (1967; a film with the same title, 1970), and What Do You Want? (1969) concentrate on the acute questions of the day. The novels created a lively polemic in the press.

Kochetov was awarded two Orders of Lenin, the Order of the October Revolution, the Order of the Red Star, and various medals.