Fedor Vasil'evich Gladkov

Writer

• Born: June 9, 1883
• Birthplace: Chernavka, Russia
• Died: December 20, 1958
• Place of death: Moscow, Russia

Biography

Fedor Vasil’evich Gladkov was born in prerevolutionary Russia in 1883. He lived through the entire Communist revolution and became one of the establishment figures of Stalinist literature. He was born into a peasant family of Old Believers (ultraconservative Russian Orthodox separated from the state church). Although he did not begin formal education until the age of ten, when a school was built in his village, he learned to read and write early and was introduced by his mother to Russia’s extensive folklore tradition. As a result, by the time he was ten he was already reading classic Russian authors like Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. He completed his secondary education in 1900 and qualified as an elementary school teacher. In that year he began publishing stories in the local newspaper in the style of the contemporary writer Maxim Gorky, with whom he began a correspondence.

In 1905 he moved to Georgia and joined a Bolshevik group in Tblisi. In the ensuing political unrest he was sent into forced labor in Siberia for four years. After his release he worked his way up to school inspector until the Russian Revolution of 1917. After that, he helped reform the education system in the Novorossiisk area, worked as editor of a local paper, and became a political instructor for the Red Army. Gorky arranged for him to be transferred to Moscow in 1921, and it was only then he decided to become a full-time writer.

Gladkov was soon publishing stories regularly in important literary journals, including Novyi mir (new world), and he eventually aligned himself with Kuznitsa, a group promoting truly proletarian writing. Most of his stories before this point had been about individual characters, the revolutionary struggle, and social injustice. But his most-famous novel, Tsement (cement, 1925), introduced a new subgenre to Marxist literature, the production novel, wherein the plot and characters are focused on the production of material goods in fulfilment of the Soviet planned economy. In this story the protagonist is a proletarian hero who reopens a cement factory and makes it a model of efficiency and community despite great personal loss to his family life. Gladkov constantly revised this work in an effort to avoid stylistic ornateness and to allow the hero’s personal loss to be lessened. He insisted that he made his revisions for artistic reasons and that he was not beholden to the constantly changing “rules” of Stalinist life.

Later came Malen’kaya trilogiya (little trilogy, 1936), three satirical novellas about “false” individuals in the regime. A second production novel followed, Energiia (energy, 1933 and 1939). From 1928 to 1932 Gladkov spent time researching the book in a Ukrainian hydroelectric power plant in accordance with Stalin’s first Five Year Plan. Energiia’s first chapters appeared in Novyi mir in 1932, but the novel was not completed until 1939. Gladkov spent most of the war years in Sverdlovsk (Ekaterinburg) reporting on the Soviet war effort and writing stories lauding the factory workers.

After the war he became director of the Gorky Literary Institute from 1944 to 1948. While in retirement he wrote three autobiographical novels and arranged a complete set of his own collected works. He also wrote several plays. He was awarded the Stalin Prize in 1951 and the Order of Lenin in 1953. He was buried in Moscow in 1958.