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withholding his more controversial works.
STALIN
's
death in March 1953 enabled him to return to
large-scale symphonic expression in his Tenth
Symphony (1953), but he continued to suffer
official harassment, especially after the appear-
ance of his Thirteenth Symphony, which included
a text by the poet Yevgenii
YEVTUSHENKO
that
touched on Russian
ANTI
-
SEMITISM
. By 1960 he
was in good graces again with the Soviet estab-
lishment, becoming secretary of the RSFSR
Union of Composers. A prolific composer who
wrote operas, ballets, choral works, oratorios,
symphonies, song cycles, as well as music for
plays and films, Shostakovich had a highly indi-
vidual, austere style. His later works, including
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth symphonies (1970
and 1972), are bleakly obsessed with mortality.
shin also excelled at writing, publishing short
stories in the prestigious journal
Novyi mir,
as
well as a novel about Stenka
RAZIN
, the 17th-
century rebel and
COSSACK
leader. However, his
plans to turn it into a film tentatively entitled
I
Came to Give You Freedom
were squelched by the
cinema bureaucracy. Always carrying his native
Siberia in his work, Shukshin was one of the
leading
derevenshchiki
(
VILLAGE PROSE
) writers
who presented the virtues of rural life and moral-
ity and the conflicts and tensions that arose
between rural and urban dwellers. Together with
writers like Yuri
TRIFONOV
, Valentin Rasputin,
and Feodor
ABRAMOV
, Shukshin reached a large
Soviet audience and maintained high artistic
standards during the
BREZHNEV
era. His unex-
pected death from a heart attack while on loca-
tion was felt as a national tragedy. Soon after his
death, a small hill decorated with red snowball
berries, in memory of his most popular film,
appeared at the Novodevichi Cemetery in Mos-
cow, not far from the graves of
CHEKHOV
,
GOGOL
,
and
BULGAKOV
. He received a posthumous
LENIN
PRIZE
(1976).
Shukshin, Vasili Makarovich
(1929-1974)
actor and writer
A multitalented actor, writer, and film director,
Shukshin was much beloved by Soviet audiences
of the 1960s and 1970s for his ability to project a
complex, “everyday man.” Shukshin was born
into a Russian family in a remote Siberian village.
At the age of 15 he left home, beginning a period
in his life where he had many occupations
including fitter, house painter, sailor, radio oper-
ator,
KOMSOMOL
official, and school principal. He
arrived in Moscow in 1954. Without any previ-
ous studies or training in cinema, he passed the
difficult entrance exams to the prestigious State
Film School in Moscow, graduating in 1960 as a
film director. He attended Mikhail Romm's sem-
inal workshop with other young directors whose
talents would blossom in the 1960s, including
his good friend Andrei
TARKOVSKY
. His debut
film,
There Was a Lad
(1964), introduced a fresh
talent to Soviet audiences. His most popular and
important film,
Snowballberry Red (Kalina Kras-
naya)
(1974), for which he wrote the script,
directed, and played the lead role, featured an
imperfect hero, a former criminal trying to go
straight by working on a collective farm. Shuk-
Sikorsky, Igor Ivanovich
(1889-1972)
aircraft designer
A talented aeronautical engineer, manufacturer,
and inventor, Sikorsky is most often associated
with the development of the helicopter as a
viable means of air transport. Sikorsky was born
in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, where his father
was a professor of psychology at St. Vladimir
University. He graduated from the St. Petersburg
Naval Academy and then pursued further stud-
ies in Paris and the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. In
1908, impressed by the news of Count Ferdi-
nand von Zeppelin's dirigible, he turned to the
study of aviation. In 1913, at the age of 24 he
designed, built, and flew the first successful four-
engine airplane, known as the
Grand.
During
World War I, he designed four-engine bombers
for the Russian army. Opposed to the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917, he left Russia in 1918 and
settled in Paris but was not able to make a living
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