Arkadii Dmitrievich Chernyshevich

Born July 26 (Aug. 8), 1912, in the village of Kulaki, in what is now Soligorsk Raion, Minsk Oblast; died Jan. 18,1967, in Minsk. Soviet Byelorussian writer.

The son of a peasant, Chernyshevich lived in the Northern Urals from 1930 to 1950 and worked as a logger, builder, and primary school teacher. He was first published in 1940. His works include the cycle of children’s stories Summer (1940), the novellas In One Family (1951) and On the Ponds (1954; Russian translation, 1958), and short stories, such as those in the collection Through Winters and Springs (1960). In the novel Dawn (1957) Chernyshevich described the life of a Byelorussian village in the early 1920’s. In The Malinovka Torture Chamber (1964–65; Russian translation under the title Turn of the Century, 1966), a novel dealing with revolutionary history, he depicted the life of the people on the eve of the Revolution of 1905–07 and a young peasant’s difficult path to revolution. Works by Chernyshevich have been translated into various languages of the USSR.