Iashin, Aleksandr Iakovlevich

(real surname, Popov). Born Mar. 14 (27), 1913, in the village of Bludnovo, in what is now Nikol’sk Raion, Vologda Oblast; died July 11, 1968, in Moscow; buried in Bludnovo. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1941.

Iashin graduated from the Gorky Institute of World Literature in 1941. His work first appeared in print in 1928. His experiences in World War II were reflected in verse collections, for example, // Was on the Baltic (1942), and in A Leningrad Poem (published 1976). His verse from the 1930’s and 1940’s, including the collections Woman of the North (1938) and Countrymen (1946) and the narrative poem Alena Fomina (1949; State Prize of the USSR, 1950), poeticized, occasionally rather idyllically, life and work in a kolkhoz village. Beginning in the mid-1950’s, Iashin’s works became concerned with the development of the personality of the lyric hero and with moral self-criticism, as in the collection Conscience (1961); his themes were those of love, creative work, nature, and death, as reflected in the collections Barefoot Across the Land (1965) and The Day of Creation (1968). After his short story “Levers” (1956), which was criticized for its negative depiction of rural Communists, and the novella The Orphan (1962), with its image of various Soviet institutions as the “eternal dependent,” Iashin published the novel Vologda Wedding (1962), a historical representation of the social structure of a modern village. He also wrote cycles of lyric short stories, including Sweet Island (published 1969).

Iashin was awarded the Order of the Red Star and various medals.