Lidiia Seifullina

Born Mar. 22 (Apr. 3), 1889, in the settlement of Verkhneuvel’skii, in what is now Chebarkul’ Raion, Cheliabinsk Oblast; died Apr. 25, 1954, in Moscow. Soviet Russian writer.

Seifullina graduated from the Higher Pedagogical Courses in Moscow (1920). Beginning in 1917, she appeared regularly in print. Her early novellas and short stories, including “The Lawbreakers” (1922), Humus (1922), “A Peasant Tale About Lenin” (1924), Virineia (1924), and Cain-Tavern (1926), were among the first works of Soviet realist prose; they offered a truthful depiction of the life and struggles of the people during the Civil War of 1918–20, eloquently portraying the destruction of the old way of life and the transformation of the consciousness of peasant women. Virineia furnished the subject for a play of the same name (1925), written in collaboration with V. P. Pravdukhin, which has been staged in Soviet and foreign theaters. Among the more outstanding later works were the short stories “Property” (1933) and “Tania” (1934), the play Natasha (1937), and the novella about the Great Patriotic War On One’s Own Land (1946). Seifullina was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.