The directory «Plots»
Pavlenko (Ïàâëåíêî) Pyotr Andreevich
(1899—1951)
Russian Soviet writer. Born in Petersburg, the son of an office worker. He received his education at the Bakinsky Tekhnicum, from which he graduated in 1920. That same year, he joined the Bolshevik Party and the Red Army, where he served as a political worker, including duty in the oil city of Baku. After the Civil War, he worked in the Soviet trade mission which took him to Turkey, Syria, Greece, Italy, and France between 1924 and 1927.
As a writer, Pavlenko made his literary debut with «Asian Tales», exotic in subject matter and florid in >Siberia. It is a picture of stabilization after the hectic Revolutionary period. But still there are White Russian spies and military worries. And--wouldn't you just know it--Japan starts a war. But the Soviet Union bombs Tokyo, sinks the Japanese fleet with its submarines, and stops a Japanese attack with a new secret weapon.
Pavlenko also undertook to write several successful film scripts, most notably his collaboration with film genius Sergei Eisenstein on «Aleksandr Nevsky» (1938). His second film script was for «Yakov Sverdlov» (1940), about the life and work of the famous Bolshevik. This film won a State Prize, second class. In 1942 he produced a script for the film «Slavnii Malii», a «heroic musical comedy» adaptation of his own story, «The Avengers», which tells the tale of a French flyer who is shot down during the war and winds up in a detatchment of partisans around Novgorod. His next film script, «Vow» (1946), centers around a woman's two meetings with Stalin--the first after Lenin's death when Stalin vows to remain true to the great leader's legacy, and the second following the end of the Great Patriotic War. Pavlenko continued his service to the cult of the personality in the script for «The Fall of Berlin» (1949), a war film. Pavlenko's last script was for «Composer Glinka» (1952), a film in which he also acted the role of F. Bulgarin.
Besides his artistic work, Pavlenko also worked as a journalist. He reported directly from the court room during the 1927 trial against the anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center. He was a war correspondent during the Soviet-Finnish War of 1939 and 1940 and again during World War II, working for «Pravda» and «Krasnaya Zvezda». Between 1942 and 1943 he also served as the Chairman of the Defense Commission of the Union of Writers.
Numerous of his stories and war sketches appeared in the books «Path of Bravery» (1942) and «People's Avengers».
Pavlenko's main work, for which he won the Stalin Prize in 1947, is «Happiness». Set mainly in the Crimea in 1944 and 1945, it is the story of a wounded war veteran who comes to the war-torn Crimea hoping to settle down to a nice, quiet life. Instead, he finds happiness by plunging himself into Party work to aid in the reconstruction of the area.
The novel «Happpiness» also highlights a difference between the Soviet and Western social systems: In Austria, the Soviet army takes time to help some peasants plow their field, asking for only a thank you in return. The Americans see this as insidious propaganda, while at they same time they see nothing wrong with painting soap advertisements on the sides of their tanks.
The short novel «Steppe Sun» was published in 1949.
Pyotor Pavelko won a total of four Stalin Prizes (1941, 1947, 1948, and 1950).
Czechoslovakia, 1951, Scene from film «Fall of Berlin»
Czechoslovakia, 1951, Scene from film «Fall of Berlin»
USSR, 1988, 
Pyotr Pavlenko
