Kochin, Nikolai Ivanovich

Born July 2 (15), 1902, in the village of Gremiachaia Poliana, now in Dal’ne Konstantinovo Raion, Gorky Oblast. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU since 1940. Son of a peasant.

In the early postrevolutionary years, Kochin worked for the Committee of the Poor and was a village correspondent for the newspaper Bednota (“The Poor”). He graduated from the Nizhny Novgorod Pedagogic Institute in 1924 and became a teacher. Kochin’s first works appeared in print in 1925. His novel Village Girls (books 1–2, 1928–31) was a major work in Soviet literature about the life of the peasantry on the eve of collectivization. The novel Fellows (1934), the novella Notes of a Village Correspondent (1929; separate edition, 1930), and the autobiographical tale Youth unfold the life of the Soviet countryside at various periods in history. Kochin is also the author of Kulibin (revised, 1940) and the novel The Nizhny Novgorod Otkos (1970), which describes student life right after the Revolution. His collections of publicistic articles include The Initiative of the Village ofPochiaki (1931) and The Countryside in the Days of the War (1942). Kochin was awarded two orders and various medals.