19 Facts About Boris Pilnyak

Boris Pilnyak was born Boris Andreyevich Vogau in Mozhaysk.

Boris Pilnyak's father was a doctor, descended from German farmers who settled on the banks of the Volga during the reign of Catherine the Great.

Boris Pilnyak's mother came from an old merchant family from Saratov.

Boris Pilnyak achieved fame very quickly at the age of 25 through his novel The Naked Year, one of the first fictional accounts of the Russian civil war.

Boris Pilnyak was a major supporter of anti-urbanism and a critic of mechanized society, views which brought him into disfavor with Communist critics.

Boris Pilnyak followed this with a strange short story The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon, published in the literary journal Novy Mir in May 1926.

Boris Pilnyak dies on the operating table, the implication being that the 'three who lead' had wanted him dead.

Boris Pilnyak was in China, on a tour of the Far East when the storm broke, and could have defected, but instead hurried back to defend himself.

Unlike Yevgeny Zamyatin, who was subjected to a similar attack at the same time and refused to apologise or back down, Boris Pilnyak capitulated and agreed to comply with the regime's requirements.

Boris Pilnyak found a new protector in Nikolai Yezhov, the future murderous head of the NKVD, who acted as his personal censor during the composition of his next novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea, which described the forced industrialisation drive in glowing language.

Boris Pilnyak used the visit to Japan to write A story about how stories come to be written.

Boris Pilnyak was allocated a private dacha on an estate reserved for privileged writers, where his neighbour was Boris Pasternak, one of the few who had defended him in 1929.

When he heard that Karl Radek, a prominent member of the left wing opposition, was living in hardship after being exiled to Tomsk, Boris Pilnyak sent him money.

Boris Pilnyak corresponded with the Spanish communist, Andres Nin, who broke with Stalin in 1927 and founded the POUM.

When Victor Serge was arrested in Moscow, Boris Pilnyak urged Nin to generate international pressure to secure his release.

Boris Pilnyak was accused of plotting to kill Stalin and Yezhov, and of being a Japanese spy.

Boris Pilnyak was tried on 21 April 1938, pleaded guilty, and was shot the same day.

Boris Pilnyak began to be rehabilitated and appreciated again in the USSR in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Boris Pilnyak is generally considered the greatest Russian novelist of 1920s and was the second most read writer of that time, only behind Maxim Gorky.