Ivan Volnov

Born Jan. 3 (15), 1885, in the village of Bogoroditskoe, present-day Orel Oblast; died there Jan. 9, 1931. Soviet Russian writer.

Vol’nov was born into a poor peasant family. He was a village schoolmaster. He joined the Socialist Revolutionary Party, whose ideology he later condemned in the novella The Meeting (1927). He was sent to Siberia for attempting to assassinate a tsarist official, and in 1910 he fled abroad, where he met M. Gorky. In 1917 he returned to Russia and participated in the Civil War. The autobiographical Tale of the Days of My Life (1912) and the novellas Youth (1913), On the Border (1913), and Return (written 1928, published 1956) weave a great prose tapestry of the hard lot of the peasantry in prerevolutionary Russia. Vol’nov’s postrevolutionary stories and sketches are concerned with the transformations in rural life in the Soviet period.