Mamontov, Iakov

Born Oct. 23 (Nov. 4), 1888, on the khutor (private farmstead) of Strelichnyi, present-day Sumy Oblast; died Jan. 31, 1940, in Kharkov. Soviet Ukrainian writer.

Mamontov was the son of a peasant. He graduated from the Moscow Commercial Institute in 1914. His first story, “Under Black Clouds,” was published in 1907. His poetry was published in 1924 (the miscellany Garlands Beyond the Waters). The Civil War of 1918-20 is the theme of the plays When the People Free Themselves (1923), Until the Cock Crows Thrice (1925), Battalion of the Dead (1926), and A Republic on Wheels (1928). Mamontov is the author of the comedy Pink Cobwebs (1928), which attacks philistinism; the drama His Property (1930), about the struggle against Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism; a play about kolkhoz life, Of Our Kin (1936); and the satire Hetmanshchina (1930-39). He also wrote works on drama and the theater.