Bezymenskii, Aleksandr Ilich

Born Jan. 6 (18), 1898, in Zhitomir. Soviet Russian poet. Member of the CPSU since 1916.

Bezymenskii took part in the October Revolution in Petrograd. He was a leader in the Young Communist movement, a member of the first convocation of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Youth League, and also a delegate to Komsomol congresses. At the seventh congress of the All-Union Lenin Communist Youth League he was elected an honorary Komsomol member.

Bezymenskii began publishing in 1918 and later became an active member of RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers). His first collections of poetry, October Dawns (1920) and Toward the Sun (1921), were marked by traits of the cosmic-abstract poetry of those years. Overcoming these tendencies, Bezymenskii turned to a depiction of the heroic quality of everyday life under the revolution—for example, the collection How Life Smells (1924) and the poems “On a Cap” and “On Felt Boots.” Many of his poems and songs are devoted to the Komsomol—for example, “The Young Guard” (1922), “Komsomol Fleet March” (1924), and the narrative poem Komsomoliia (1924). Bezymenskii came to be known as the poet of the Komsomol. He is also the author of the narrative poems Small Town (1921, published in 1922–23), Vladimir ll’ich Ul’ianov (1926), Felix (1927), Petersburg Blacksmith (1937, published in 1939), and Tragic Night (1930–63), devoted to the construction of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station.

Bezymenskii lashed out against careerism, bureaucratism, and bootlicking and exposed the forces of international reaction in numerous satirical works—the narrative poem Day of Our Life (1928), the verse play The Shot (1929), and the collections Verses of Wrath (1949) and A Book of Satires (1954), for example. Bezymenskii worked in the traveling editorial offices of Pravda and Komsomolskaia Pravda at plants and on new construction sites. Characteristic of Bezymenskii’s poetry are the contemporary subject matter and aphoristic, terse, and slogan-like lines. He has been awarded six orders and various medals.