Boris Lavrenev

Борис Андреевич Лавренёв
(1891-1959)
(source: wikimedia)
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Boris Lavrenev started as a Futurist poet, in 1911; it was the epoch when young artists were looking courageously for new ways of expression, for unexpected joins of words, trying to bravely reconstruct the language, even from the alphabet and the syllables; Lavrenev was in this; then started the world war; he fought in it, then in the Civil War in the Red Army, as a commander of an armored train on the front in Turkmenistan; no wonder that his literary preoccupations changed their focus; in 1924 he began to publish prose; his short stories have a fine quality of nuancing his Bolshevist credo with a subtle understating of the paradox and the unexpected that come as life is unfolding; the view of a man who fought in the war, saw there a lot of stuff and understood that there was always something going far from the black and white.

• The Forty-First

(Жизнь в Kнигах)