Pelagea and Alka

Fyodor Alexandrovich Abramov
USSR, 29.2.1920 — 1983

Fyodor Alexandrovich Abramov was born on February 29, 1920, in the village of Verkolа, in the Pinezhsky District of Arkhangelsk Oblast, into a peasant family. As a volunteer, he left for the front from the third year of the philology faculty of Leningrad University; he fought in the people’s militia and was severely wounded. From the besieged city, he was evacuated along the Road of Life over the ice of Lake Ladoga. As a non-front-line (home front) serviceman, he was left in rear units; later he was taken into the SМЕРШ counterintelligence service, where he served as an investigator until the end of the war.

After demobilization, in 1948 he graduated from Leningrad State University’s philology faculty with honors. Later he defended a candidate’s dissertation and worked for several years at Leningrad State University as head of the department of Soviet literature. He began publishing as a critic. His debut novel “Brothers and Sisters” (1958). This novel is the first part of the trilogy “Prasylyany” (The Praslyonys), for which the writer in 1975 was awarded the State Prize of the USSR. Abramov’s last work, the novella “A Trip into the Past,” was published posthumously in 1989.