Kuzma Chornyi

(pen name of Nikolai Karlovich Romanovskii). Born June 11 (24), 1900, in the village of Borki, in what is now Kopyl’ Raion, Minsk Oblast; died Nov. 22, 1944, in Minsk. Soviet Byelorussian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1943.

Chornyi was of peasant stock, the son of a hired hand. He studied in the division of literature and linguistics of Byelorussian State University from 1923 to 1925. His early published works appeared in 1921 and were followed by the short-story collections The Silver of Life (1925), Along the Road (1926), Feelings (1926), and September Nights (1929) and the novels The Sister (1927–28) and The Earth (1928). Chornyi’s works reveal a desire common to many Byelorussian writers to master the methods of psychological prose, especially as exemplified by L. N. Tolstoy and F. M. Dostoevsky. The novella Levon Bushmar (1930) and the novel The Fatherland (1931) re-create revolutionary life in their portrayal of full-scale characters.

The true hero of Chornyi’s works is history, philosophically interpreted. The novel The Third Generation (1935) and the novella Liuba Luk’ianskaia (1936) were intended as parts of a cycle of sociophilosophical works embracing several decades of Byelorussian history. During the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), Chornyi continued to work on the cycle, producing the war novels The Great Day (published 1947), Search for the Future (published 1950), and Skip’evskii Forest (published 1955) and the philosophical novel The Milky Way (published 1954).

Chornyi translated the works of A. S. Pushkin, N. V. Gogol, and other Russian classics. His works have been translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR. Chornyi was awarded the Order of the Red Star and several medals.