Boris Mozhayev

Boris Andreyevich Mozhayev (Борис Андреевич Можаев; June 1, 1923, in Pitelino village, Ryazan Governorate - March 2, 1996, in Moscow) was a Soviet Russian author, dramatist, script-writer and editor, the USSR State Prize (1989) laureate, best known for his novel Zhivoy (Alive, 1966) and the two-part epic Peasant Men and Women (Muzhiki i babyi, 1972-1980). Supported by Alexander Tvardovsky and admired by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mozhayev experienced serious difficulties with publishing his harshly realistic, tinged with bitter humour Village prose, dealing with trials and tribulations of the Soviet peasantry in the years of collectivisation and beyond. Boris Andreyevich Mozhayev was born on June 1, 1923, in Ryazanskaya Oblast, to an Oka River steamship pilot; all of his ancestors (on mother's side too) have been one way or another connected to Oka, Volga or the Caspian Sea, where they worked as sailors, skippers, navigators, even burlaks. In 1935, during the Stalin purges, Andrey Mozhayev was arrested and deported to the Russian far East where he died. Boris was one of the six children his mother had to raise on her own. In 1940, after graduating the secondary school, Mozhayev enrolled into the shipbuilding faculty of the Gorky Institute of Navy Transport Engineers. He had to leave it due to financial difficulties and, after working as a teacher for half a year, got drafted. In 1943 he joined the Military Engineering-Technical University in Leningrad.