Mitrei Kedra

(pseudonym of Dmitrii Ivanovich Korepanov). Born Sept. 16 (28), 1892; died Nov. 11, 1949. Soviet Udmurt writer. Member of the CPSU from 1922. Born in the village of Igra, in the present-day Udmurt ASSR.

Kedra wrote the autobiographical novella Child of a Sick Century (1911, published in fragments) and the historical tragedy Eshterek (1915) in Russian. After the Great October Socialist Revolution he published the tragedy Idna, the Hero (1926), the novella The Old Village (1926), and the first Udmurt novel, The Heavy Yoke (1929), in his native language. The Heavy Yoke deals with the hard life of the people during the forced Christianization of the region in the late 18th and early 19th century. Kedra’s sketches and short stories were published in the collections Long lagan (1931) and The Struggle (1936). He served as chairman of the Writers’ Union of Udmurtia and participated in the first Congress of Writers of the USSR (1934).