Nikolaeva, Galina Evgenevna

(real surname, Volianskaia). Born Feb. 5 (18), 1911, in the village of Usmanka, in what is now Mariinsk Raion, Kemerovo Oblast; died Oct. 18, 1963, in Moscow. Soviet Russian author.

The daughter of a schoolteacher, Nikolaeva graduated from the Gorky Medical Institute in 1935. Beginning in 1939 she published a variety of works, including the collection of verses Through Fire (1946), the short story “Death of the Army Commander” (1945), and the essays Kolkhoz “Tractor” (1948) and Features of the Future (1949). Her novel Harvest (1950; State Prize of the USSR, 1951) was used as the basis for the film The Return of Vasilii Bortnikov (1953). The novel depicts the people of a northern village and the postwar restoration of the rural economy. She dedicated Tale of the Director of an MTS and the Chief Agronomist (1954) to rural youth. In the novel Battle En Route (1957; film of the same name, 1961), Nikolaeva presented a broad panorama of Soviet life in the 1950’s and depicted the new socialist relations existing between the individual and the community. The great changes in the inner makeup of the Soviet man are portrayed in Granny Vasilisa’s Tales of Wonders (1962), a book based on folklore. Excerpts from her novel on physicists, Strong Interaction, and her lyrical-philosophical diary, Our Garden, were published posthumously in 1964. Nikolaeva’s works are characterized by an interest in the inner world of contemporary man and a direct confrontation of the burning social and moral issues of her time. They have been translated into many foreign languages and into the languages of the peoples of the USSR. Nikolaeva was awarded two orders and a number of medals.