Kozachenko, Vasily Pavlovich

He was born 12 ( March 25 ), 1913 in the village of Novoarkhangelsk (now pgt, Kirovograd region , Ukraine ) in a peasant family.

He graduated from the local seven-year school, studied at the literary department of the Uman Institute of Social Education , worked as a teacher, also in the Komsomol district committee. In 1938 he graduated from the Faculty of Philology of the KSU named after T. G. Shevchenko .

In 1939 - 1941 he worked in the editorial office of the journal "Soviet Literature".

Like most Soviet writers, from the first day of the Great Patriotic War Kozachenko - in the army. “After the summer battles and defenses of Kiev,” the writer recalls, “I, a man of 27 years old, the platoon commander of the storekeepers and the beginning author of two small books, were surrounded and were in the territory occupied by the Nazis.”

He was the commander of a rifle platoon, during the Kiev defensive operation in 1941 , was surrounded, joined the underground, was one of the organizers of the Chapaev partisan detachment in Kirovograd region.

The underground work gave the writer an extremely important and reliable material for creativity, which he does not cease even during these difficult years. Returning in the spring of 1944 to the liberation of Kiev, V. Kozachenko brought with him and published 17 stories and the price of life in magazines and a separate book.

After the war, he worked in the editorial offices of the republican magazines "Fight" and "Dnipro". From 1959 - Executive Secretary, Deputy Chairman, 1st Deputy Chairman, in 1973–1979 - 1st Secretary of the SPU Board; Secretary of the USSR JV Board, Chairman of the Council of the Union of Writers of the USSR on adventure and science fiction literature. In 1957, as part of the Ukrainian government delegation, he participated in the work of the UN General Assembly . Since 1966 - Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He was elected a deputy to the USSR Supreme Soviet of the 9th convocation and the Supreme Council of the Ukrainian SSR of the 7th to 8th convocations.

He died on March 2, 1995 . He was buried in Kiev at the Baikov Cemetery .

For the first time, V. Kozachenko published in the Literary Gazette of 1938 . In 1938–1941, his stories “Pegasus”, “Daniel Skorobogatko”, “The First Platoon”, a collection of short stories “The Golden Letter” ( 1939 ), were published. The themes of most of his works are war and revolution. For example, the essay "Monument" - the commander of the Red Army . The revolutionary-heroic romance is traced in his works "In the laboratory", "In the land of heroes." Critics considered some of his stories somewhat simplistic, but on the whole his work was interesting to the then reader.

In 1939, the first collection of short stories by the writer "Golden Literacy" was published. Of the most notable works of V. Kozachenko of the early period, the story “The First Platoon”, published in a separate book in 1941, should be noted. This is a story about the everyday life of the Red Army (the first part is “A Song of the Camps”), about its liberation campaign on the Western Ukrainian lands in 1939 (the second part is the Song of the Sun).

In 1942 he wrote the story "The Cost of Life" about the heroic struggle of the underground workers against the invaders. In 1945, his collection “Three summers” was published, from the stories of which the decisive and implacable Soviet people in the struggle against fascism emerge. The collection includes the story "They were forty." The style of writing these stories is more journalistic than purely artistic. Also V. Kozachenko owns such stories as “The Personal File of Akulina Ulinets”, “New Streams”, essays “Eight Hundred Millions”, “New York Near”, the story “Mother’s Heart”, “Salvia”, etc. For the development of V. Kozachenko , as well as in general for the history of Ukrainian prose on the military-patriotic theme, his two early stories are indicative - “Certificate of Maturity” and “Mother's Heart”, which have become popular, especially among young readers. Works today have two dozen editions and translated into Russian, Belarusian, Moldavian, Azerbaijani, as well as into Polish, Czech.

The prose writer dedicated several short stories and stories to the post-war village: “New Streams”, “Kalina Ulinets personal file”, “Dawn meet” and others. In a number of stories he described the workers of modern Donbass, episodes from international life (“Character”, “Business of the Red Freddie”, “Eight hundred Millions”).

Certain works by V. Kozachenko were published in Russian, Bulgarian, Armenian, Lithuanian, German, Polish, Hungarian, French and other languages.

• two orders of Lenin (10/28/1967; 03/23/1973)
• Order of the Patriotic War, II degree (11.3.1985)
• Order of the Red Banner of Labor (11/24/1960)
• Order of the Badge of Honor (18.4.1963)
• Medal "Partisan of the Patriotic War" I degree
• medals
• USSR State Prize named after T. G. Shevchenko (1971) - for the cycle of stories "The Price of Life", "Hot Hands", "Lightning", "Letters from patron", "Arinka Kalinovskaya", "White Spot")
• Alexander Fadeev Medal (1973) - for the story "Lightning" and "White Spot"
• Award LKSU named after N. Ostrovsky (1963) - for the story "Lightning"

• Kobylevsky S. Yu. Literary portraits . - K.: Holding Ukraine, 1960. - P.145-184
• Pinchuk S.P., Vasily Kozachenko. Literary critical essay , K., 1963
• Kozachenko Vasily Pavlovich on who-is-who.ua (inaccessible link)
• Vasily Kozachenko on the site www.history.org.ua

• http://sites.google.com/site/narcbs/vasil-kozacenko