Bek, Aleksandr Alfredovich
Bek, Aleksandr Al’fredovich
Born Dec. 21, 1902 (Jan. 3, 1903), in Saratov. Soviet Russian writer. Participant in the Civil and Great Patriotic wars. First appeared in print in 1919.
Bek’s first novella, Kurako (1934), deals with an outstanding Russian blast-furnace worker. The novella Volokolamsk Highway (1943–44) and its sequels, the novellas Several Days and The Reserves of General Panfilov (1960), brilliantly reveal the steadfastness of the Soviet combatants, heroes of the defense of Moscow in 1941. After the war he published a series of works about metallurgists: the collection of stories Blast-furnace Workers (1946), Timofei the Open-hearted (1948), the novella New Profile (1951), and the novel Young People (1954, with N. Loiko). A revelation of the psychology of technical creation is at the center of the novel The Life of Berezhkov (1956). Creating generalized artistic images having a documentary basis, Bek writes compellingly about labor, regarding it as the basic substance of human life.
WORKS
Neskol’ko dnei: Povesti i rasskazy. Moscow, 1961.Na fronte i v tylu: Povesti i rasskazy. Stranitsy iz zapisnykh knizhek. Moscow, 1965.
Pochtovia Proza: Pis’ma, dnevniki, vstrechi, zametki, nabliudeniia. Moscow, 1968.
REFERENCES
Khmel’nitskaia, T. “Volokolamskoe shosse.” Zvezda, 1945, no. 3. (A review.)Pitliar, I. “Liudi smeloi i shchedroi mysli.” Znamia, 1956, no. 8.
Grudtsova, O. M. Aleksandr Bek: Kritiko-biograficheskii ocherk. Moscow, 1967.
Kuznetsov, M. “Zhizn’ Beka.” Voprosy literatury, 1969, no. 8.
Russkie sovetskie pisateli-prozaiki: Biobibliograficheskii ukazatel’, vol. 1. Leningrad, 1959.