Alexander Alexandrovich Fadeyev - Biography

Biography

Fadeyev was born in Kimry, Tver Oblast. From 1908 to 1912, he lived in Chuguyevka, Primorsky Krai. He took part in the guerrilla movement against the Japanese interventionists and the White Army during the Russian Civil War. In 1927, he published the novel The Rout (also known as The Nineteen), in which he described youthful guerrilla fighters. In 1930, he published the first part of the novel The Last of the Udege, on which he continued working the rest of his life (an edition containing the second volume, all he was able to complete, was published in 1940.) In it, Fadeyev intended to show "that an extremely primitive people may experience a leap from tribal communism to the complex collective organization of the twentieth century, skipping over the intervening historical stages: family, private property, slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. Uneven though it is, The Last of the Udegs contains some of Fadeyev's best pages, and the fact that he spent his energies on literary administration rather than on the completion of this novel is a minor tragedy."

In 1945, he wrote the novel, The Young Guard (based upon real events of World War II) about the underground Komsomol organization named Young Guard, which fought against the Nazis in the occupied city Krasnodon (in the Ukrainian SSR). For this novel, Fadeyev was awarded the Stalin Prize (1946). In 1948, a Soviet film The Young Guard, based on the book, was released, and later revised in 1964 to correct inaccuracies in the book.

Fadeyev was a champion of Joseph Stalin, proclaiming him "the greatest humanist the world has ever known". During the 1940s, he actively promoted Zhdanovshchina, a campaign of criticism and persecution against many of the Soviet Union's foremost writers and composers. However, he was a friend of Mikhail Sholokhov. Fadeyev married a famous stage actress, Angelina Stepanova (1905–2000).

In the last years of his life, Fadeyev became an alcoholic. Some sources claim that this was mostly due to the denunciation of Stalinism during the Khrushchev Thaw. He eventually committed suicide at his dacha in Peredelkino, leaving a letter from which one can see his negative attitude to the new leaders of the Party. His death occasioned an epigram by Boris Pasternak, his neighbor.

Alexander Fadeyev is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.