Veselyi, Artem

(pseudonym of Nikolai Ivanovich Kochkurov). Born Sept. 17 (29), 1899; died Dec. 2, 1939. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the Communist Party beginning in March 1917. Born in Samara (now Kuibyshev) into the family of a stevedore.

Veselyi went to work at the age of 14. He took part in the October Revolution and the Civil War and in 1919 fought on the Denikin front as a volunteer. He was a sailor in the Black Sea Fleet (1922) and worked in the Cheka. He was a member of the Pereval literary group and later joined the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (1929). He wrote the plays The Magic Herb (1919) and We (1921), the novellas Rivers of Fire (1924) and Native Land (1926), the stories Wild Heart (1925), and others. His most important work was the novel Russia, Washed Clean by Blood (1924, full publication 1932), which is dedicated to the principal theme of his work—Russia awakened by the revolution and the storms of the Civil War and the growth of the revolutionary awareness of the peasants and soldiers (mostly in the Kuban and the Volga Region). In portraying the movement of the masses of the people as a mighty spontaneous process, he did not perceive in it the organized revolutionary force and individual human characters. His last work, the historical novel Raise Hell, Volga! (1932), is about Ermak’s campaign in Siberia. The richness and colorfulness of the language and the folklore techniques link his prose closely with the speech of the peasants and the soldiers of the period of the revolution.