Kopylenko, Aleksandr Ivanovich

Born July 19 (Aug. 1), 1900, in Konstantinograd, present-day Krasnograd, Kharkov Oblast; died Dec. 1, 1958, in Kiev. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1950. Son of a railroad man.

Kopylenko studied in the department of biology at the Kharkov Institute of People’s Education from 1920 to 1925. His works were first published in 1920. In the 1920’s he published the collections of short stories Kara-Krucha (1923) and In the Name of the Ukrainian People (1924) and the novella Wild Hops (1925), where the events of the Civil War of 1918–20 and the new life in the village are depicted in the spirit of revolutionary romanticism. Kopylenko turned to realism in the novel A City Is Born (1932; Russian translation, 1935), which deals with socialist construction, in the popular novels for young people Very Good (1936) and The Tenth Grades (1938), and in a number of children’s books. His postwar novels include The Lieutenants (1947; Russian translation, 1951) and The Earth Is Big (1957; Russian translation, 1962), both of which deal with the people in the kolkhoz village. Kopylenko’s works have been translated into foreign languages.