Gurlo, Ales

(Aleksandr Kondrat’evich Gurlo). Born Jan. 19 (31), 1892, in the settlement of Kopyl’ in present-day Minsk Oblast; died Feb. 4, 1938, in Minsk. Soviet Byelorussian poet.

Gurlo participated in the October 1917 assault on the Winter Palace with a detachment of revolutionary sailors from the torpedo boat Zabiiaka. He began publishing his works in 1909; love of freedom is a constant motif in his poems about the hard lot of the peasants. His postrevolution-ary poetry was devoted to the Soviet man’s feats of labor and to nature in Byelorussia (the collections Periwinkle, 1924; Meetings, 1925; Constellations, 1926; and Boundaries, 1929).