Vitalii Zakrutkin

Born Mar. 14 (27), 1908, in Feodosiia. Soviet Russian writer.

Zakrutkin took his external degree at the M. I. Kalinin Blagoveshchensk Institute of Pedagogy in 1932 and completed graduate study at the Leningrad A. I. Hertzen Institute of Pedagogy in 1936. His collection of essays Pushkin and Lermontov was published in 1941 and his first novella, Academician Pliushchov, in 1940. He fought in the Great Patriotic War (1941–45), and his writings of this period include The Brown Plague (1941), Power (1942), and Caucasian Notes (1947). Zakrutkin’s novel The Floating Stanitsa (1950; State Prize of the USSR, 1951) deals with the daily work of the kolkhoz fishermen. He published two volumes of his epic novel The Creation of the World (book 1, 1955–56; book 2, 1967), in which the collapse of the old world and the birth of the new is seen as a single social process that began in 1917 and affected all countries and peoples. Zakrutkin’s literary style and his language have been influenced appreciably by Sholokhov’s tradition. He has been awarded four orders as well as medals.