Author of Volokolamsk Highway, whose novel of Stalinist bureaucracy was banned until glasnost
As Bek lay dying, a Writers' Union official smuggled a German edition of his banned novel The New Appointment to his hospital room. Unable to read anymore, Bek asked for the book to be placed beside him and stroked its cover.
Born in Saratov to a military doctor's family, Bek volunteered for the Red Army at sixteen and began writing for a divisional newspaper. During the Great Patriotic War he joined the Moscow People's Homeguard and served as a war correspondent, producing Volokolamsk Highway (1944): a classic of Soviet war literature that became a favorite of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. After the war he wrote extensively about metallurgists and engineers. But his roman-à-clef The New Appointment (1965), which fictionalized Stalin's heavy-industry bureaucracy, was blocked from publication and appeared in the USSR only in 1986. He is remembered as a writer who maintained an independent gaze under Party literary control.
Career Timeline
- 1919Volunteered for Red Army, wounded at Ural front; began writing for divisional newspaper
- 1931Joined Gorky's 'History of Factories and Plants' editorial project
- 1934Published first novel Kurako
- 1941–1945Moscow People's Homeguard, then war correspondent; reached Berlin
- 1944Published Volokolamsk Highway
- 1956Published Talent (The Life of Berezhkov)
- 1965Completed The New Appointment; publication blocked in USSR
- 1971The New Appointment first published in Frankfurt