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Konstantin Simonov
KONSTANTIN MIKHAILOVICH SIMONOV (1915-1979), born Kirill Mikhailovich Simonov, was a Soviet author and a war poet. He was a playwright and a wartime correspondent, most famous for his poem Wait for...view moreKONSTANTIN MIKHAILOVICH SIMONOV (1915-1979), born Kirill Mikhailovich Simonov, was a Soviet author and a war poet. He was a playwright and a wartime correspondent, most famous for his poem Wait for Me.
Simonov was born in Petrograd in 1915 to Princess Obolensky of a Rurikid family and an officer in the Tsar’s army, who left Russia after the Revolution of 1917. When his father died in Poland in 1921, Simonov remained in Russia with his stepmother, Alexandra, and his mother married Alexander Ivanischev, a Red Army officer and veteran of World War I, in the early 1920s.
Studying war correspondence at the military-political academy, Simonov obtained the service rank of quartermaster of the second rank. At the beginning of World War II Simonov received a job with the official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. He rose through the army ranks becoming a senior battalion commissar in 1942, lieutenant colonel in 1943, and a colonel after the war.
As a war correspondent, Simonov served in Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Poland, and Germany, where he was present at the Battle of Berlin. After the war his collected reports appeared in Letters from Czechoslovakia, Slav Friendship, Yugoslavian Notebook and From the Black to the Barents Sea: Notes of a War Correspondent.
For three years after the war ended, Simonov served in foreign missions in Japan, the United States and China. From 1958 to 1960 he worked in Tashkent as the Central Asia correspondent for Pravda. His novel Comrades in Arms was published in 1952, and his longer novel, The Living and the Dead, in 1959.
He died at the age of 63 in Moscow in 1979.view less