Ovechkin, Valentin Vladimirovich

Born June 9 (22), 1904, in Taganrog; died Jan. 27, 1968, in Tashkent. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1929. Fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45.

Ovechkin studied at the Taganrog Technical School from 1913 to 1919. From 1925 to 1931 he was chairman of an agricultural commune, and during the 1930’s he was a party official and a journalist. His first short story was published in 1929.

Ovechkin is the author of the novellas Praskov’ia Maksimovna (1939); Guests in Stukachi (1940); Without Family, Without Tribe (1940); and Greetings From the Front (1945).

A notable event was the appearance of Ovechkin’s innovative Workdays in the Raion (1952–56), which thoroughly examines urgent problems in agriculture and presents true-to-life portraits of raion leaders. In the work, Ovechkin affirmed Leninist standards of party life from a precise party viewpoint. The originality of Workdays in the Raion lies in its combination of publicism with the psychological development of the characters. This approach influenced the subsequent development of literature about rural life.

Ovechkin is also the author of the plays Nastia Kolosova (1949), To Meet the Wind (1958), Summer Showers (1959), and A Time to Reap (1960), as well as sketches and essays. From 1963 he lived in Tashkent, where he worked on the autobiographical cycle Uninvented Sketches (published 1972), which he never finished. Several of his works have been translated into foreign languages. Ovechkin was awarded two orders and a number of medals.