Vishnevskii, Vsevolod

Born Dec. 8 (21), 1900, in St. Petersburg; died Feb. 28, 1951, in Moscow. Soviet Russian writer. Member of the CPSU from 1937.

At the age of 14, Vishnevskii went to the front as a volunteer during World War I. While in the army, he joined the Bolsheviks in June 1917 and took part in the October 1917 Uprising in Petrograd. During the Civil War, Vishnevskii served as a machine gunner in the First Cavalry Army; he was also a commander and political worker in the Baltic and Black Sea fleets. He began to publish in 1920 and was editor of the journal Krasnoflotets. Vishnevskii participated in the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939-40 and the Great Patriotic War (as a captain of the first class); he was also editor of the journal Znamia (from 1944).

In 1924, Vishnevskii published his Collected Sea Stones. His revolutionary romantic play The First Cavalry Army (1929) was devoted to the heroic events of the Civil War. It was followed by the play The Last Decisive Battle (1931); the premonitory tragedy Fighting in the West (1931; published in 1933), one of the first Soviet antifascist plays; and An Optimistic Tragedy (1933), in which the self-sacrifice of the heroine, a woman commissar, reveals the triumph of Bolshevik truth and justice. This play and the screenplay We Are From Kronstadt (1933) became classics of the Soviet dramatic repertory. Vishnevskii also wrote the plays At the Walls of Leningrad (1944) and Unforgettable 1919 (1949; State Prize of the USSR, 1950), the film-novel We Are the Russian People (1937), and the unfinished fictionalized documentary epic War. Vishnevskii’s works are characterized by a militant political tendency, an epic quality, romantic pathos, fast-moving development, a mastery in depicting mass scenes, and oratorical devices in the exposition. His plays have enjoyed extensive fame abroad. He also wrote sketches and journalistic pieces; he collaborated on the newspaper Pravda and was one of its military correspon-dents during the years of the Great Patriotic War. Vishnevskii was awarded two Orders of Lenin, five other orders, and various medals.