Valentin Ovechkin
| Valentin Ovechkin | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
June 22, 1906 Taganrog, Russia |
| Died | January 27, 1968 (aged 63) Tashkent, Soviet Union |
Valentin Vladimirovich Ovechkin (Russian: Валентин Владимирович Овечкин; June 22, 1906 - January 27, 1968) was a Soviet writer, playwright, and journalist.
Valentin was born in Taganrog, the son of an office employee. He studied at the Taganrog Technical School from 1913 to 1919. He began writing early, while he was still a member of the Komsomol. His first story Saveliev was published in the newspaper Bednota (The Poor) in 1927. Other early works appeared in provincial papers. He stopped writing for several years and worked as a chairman of an agricultural commune on the Don River, and later in Kuban. In 1934 he became a traveling correspondent for the newspapers Molot (Hammer) and Kolkhoznaya Pravda, both published in Rostov-on-Don, and for newspapers in Armavir and Krasnodar.
His first book Kolkhoz Stories was published in Rostov-on-Don in 1935. His second collection was published in Krasnodar in 1938. In 1939 his work began to appear in the Moscow magazine Krasnaya Nov, including the novellas Guests in Stukachi, Praskovia Maximovna, and the sketch Without Kith or Kin. At the outbreak of World War II, he was mobilized and sent to work as a front-line agitator and correspondent on the Crimean and Southern fronts, and later to Stalingrad and the Ukraine. In 1945, the May issue of the magazine October published his novella Greetings from the Front, which was given a wide response in the press.
Valentin was connected with the Village Prose movement, and the majority of his works deal with life on rural collective farms, though his most popular work, the novella Greetings from the Front focused on the war. The writer Sergey Zalygin gave the following assessment of Ovechkin in the January, 1956 issue of Novy Mir:
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