Stepan Shchipachev

Born Dec. 26, 1898 (Jan. 7, 1899), in the village of Shchipachi, in what is now Ka-myshlov Raion, Sverdlovsk Oblast; died Jan. 2, 1980, in Moscow. Soviet Russian poet. Member of the CPSU from 1919.

The son of a peasant, Shchipachev graduated from the literature division of the Institute of the Red Professors in 1934. His first collections of verse were noted for their declamatory quality and their concern with cosmic themes. His poems written in the mid-1930’s included in such collections as Under the Skies of My Motherland (1937) and Lyrics (1939) have a lyric intonation.

Shchipachev’s verse exhibits the songlike quality of classical Russian poetry but gives the themes of nature and love a modern ring. In his wartime verses and narrative poems, such as Verses From the Front (1942), the lyric principle merges with the heroic. The poet deals with the motherland and V.I. Lenin in the narrative poem Little House in Shushenskoe (1944). In the postwar years Shchipachev published the collection Verse (1948; State Prize of the USSR, 1949) and the narrative poem Pavlik Morozov, (1950; State Prize of the USSR, 1951). He also produced the narrative poems The Heir (1965), Song of Moscow (1968), and Twelve Months Around the Sun (1969).

Civic motifs pervade Shchipachev’s verses written in the 1970’s, which are included in such collections as To My Life’s Comrades (1972) and I Am Thinking of the Motherland (1974). The poems of this period are also characterized by a keen interest in the inner world of the individual.

Shchipachev was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Order of Friendship of Peoples; some of his works have been translated into other languages of the USSR and into foreign languages.