Biadulia, Zmitrok

(pseudonym of Samuil Efimovich Plavnik). Born Apr. 23, 1886, in the small town of Posadets, Vilna Province; died Nov. 3, 1941; buried in Ural’sk. Soviet Byelorussian writer.

Biadulia was born into a poor Jewish family. He began to be published in 1910 in Byelorussian and Russian. His first collection of lyric stories, Portraits, appeared in 1913.

Biadulia’s early work was influenced by impressionism. He achieved his creative success under socialist reality. Biadulia used oral folk poetry in writing Poles’e Fables (1922) and the narrative poem I arila (1922). He is the author of stories from the period of the Civil War and about the prerevolutionary peasantry; the historical novella The Nightingale (1927); the collection of stories Extraordinary Stories (1931); the novel I azep Krushinskii (books 1-2, 1929-32), in which he exposed the counterrevolutionary nature of the kulaks and bourgeois nationalists; and the autobiographical novella In the Dense Forests (1939). He died en route during the evacuation. Biadulia was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.