Iurii Smolich

Born June 25 (July 8), 1900, in the city Uman’. Soviet Ukrainian writer. Hero of Socialist Labor (1970). Member of the CPSU since 1951.

Smolich studied at the Kiev Commercial Institute in 1918. He published his first works in 1917. His novel The Last Edgewood (1926), his collection Beautiful Catastrophes (1935), and his lampoon Forty-eight Hours (1933) sharply criticize capitalism. These works are among the first examples of the adventure and science-fiction genre in Soviet Ukrainian literature. In his satirical books One and One-half Men (1927), A False Melpomene (1928), and On the Other Side of the Heart (1930), Smolich denounced Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists and their foreign protectors. Before the war he also published an autobiographical trilogy, comprising Our Secrets (1936), Childhood (1937), and Eighteen-year-olds (1938).

Smolich wrote of the Soviet people’s struggle against the fascist German invaders in the novels They Didn’t Get Through (1946) and We Were Together in Battle (1948) and in several collections of articles and short stories. The labor of the Soviet people during the postwar years is the main theme of his books After the War (1947), The Day Begins Early (1950), and About the Good in People (with M. Ryl’skii, 1965). The novels Dawn Over the Sea (1953), Peace to the Huts, War on the Palaces (1958), and The Broad Dnieper Roars and Groans (1960) present a historical panorama of the Ukrainian people’s struggle to establish Soviet power. Smolich also wrote the memoirs A Tale of Disquiet (books 1-3, 1968-72) and a number of literary and journalistic works. His books have been translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR and into foreign languages.

At the Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Ukraine, Smolich was elected a candidate member of the Central Committee. He was a deputy to the eighth and ninth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR. From 1971 to 1973 he was chairman of the administrative board of the Writers’ Union of the Ukrainian SSR. Smolich has been awarded two Orders of Lenin, three other orders, and various medals.