Yury Krymov

Yury Solomonovich Krymov is the pen name of Soviet novelist Yury Solomonovich Beklemishev (Ю́рий Соломо́нович Беклеми́шев; 19 January 1908 – 20 September 1941). The variants Yuri Krimov and Iurii Krymov are common transliterations.

Biography Krymov was born in Saint Petersburg in the Russian Empire on 19 January. Krymov's father, Solomon Yuryevich Kopelman, was an editor at the Brier publishing firm. However, Yuri took the surname of his mother, Vera Yevgenyevna Beklemisheva.

Krymov graduated from Moscow State University in 1930 and first found work building a radio station. In 1932 he joined Narkomvod ("the People's Commissariat for Water Transport") and in 1936 he served on the oil tanker Profintern on the Caspian Sea, and saw the Stakhanovite movement take hold. As well as serving on the Profintern, Krymov was an engineer in a shipyard on the Caspian. He then returned to Moscow The novel found immediate critical success and was hailed as one of the best Socialist realist novels of the 1930s. Anna Karavaeva declared "In Krimov's story the theme of labour and the theme of rivalry at work are presented with profound lyricism". Valentin Kataev admitted "Frankly, I am somewhat envious, so well written are some of these pages." Anton Makarenko praised the book as "a living proof of the point of view that many of us hold, that a real writer, a real artist, issues from life."

Tanker "Derbent" was made into a film of the same name in 1941. The book was translated into a number of foreign languages, including English, German and Dutch. Krymov's original Russian edition continued to be reprinted almost annually well into the 1980s. In February 1946 the representative wrote back telling Lane that she was unable to do so because he had been killed in action.