Grin, Elmar

(pseudonym of Aleksandr Vasil’evich Iakimov). Born June 2(15), 1909, in the village of Kivennapa, now the village of Pervomaisk, Leningrad Oblast. Soviet Russian author. Born into a peasant family. Became a member of the CPSU in 1943.

Grin published his first poems in 1926. His early stories (1937) showed the tragically complex movement of Estonian and Finnish farm laborers toward political and civic self-awareness in the conditions of bourgeois reality. The theme of the international brotherhood of man and the fruitful role of the Russian proletariat in the life of Finnish laborers is at the center of the novella Wind from the South (1946; State Prize of the USSR, 1947). the novel A Different Path (book I. 1956; book 2: In the Land of Ivan, parts 1–2, 1962–67). and the story “Mother” (1957).