Valentin Petrovich Kataev (; also spelled Katayev or Kataiev; – 12 April 1986) was a Soviet writer and editor who managed to create penetrating works discussing post-revolutionary social conditions without running afoul of the demands of official Soviet style. Kataev is credited with suggesting the idea for The Twelve Chairs to his brother Yevgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf. In return, Kataev insisted that the novel be dedicated to him, in all editions and translations. Kataev's relentless imagination, sensitivity, and originality made him one of the most distinguished Soviet writers.
Life and works
Kataev was born in Odessa, Kherson Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine) into the family of Pyotr Vasilyevich Kataev, a Court councillor and a teacher at the Odesa Female seminary, and Eugenia Ivanovna Bachei who belonged to a noble family of the Poltava Governorate. Thus it's no coincidence that the main character in Kataev's semi-autobiographical novel A White Sail Gleams is named Pyotr Bachei. His father came from a long line of Russian clergy originally from Vyatka where Valentin's grandfather served as a protoiereus. His maternal grandfather was a major general in the Imperial Russian Army. Despite the obvious class conflict, Kataev never tried to hide his origins during the Soviet period.
He began writing while he was still in secondary school. He was then a sympathizer of the Union of the Russian People and wrote nationalistic and anti-Semitic poetry (later in his life he married a Jewish woman, Esther Brenner (1913-2009)). He did not finish school, but volunteered for the army in 1915, serving in the artillery. After the October Revolution, he was mobilized into the Red Army, where he fought against Anton Denikin and served in the Russian Telegraph Agency. In 1920, he became a journalist in Odessa. He moved to Moscow in 1922, where he worked on the staff of The Whistle (Gudok), writing humorous pieces under various pseudonyms.
His first novel, The Embezzlers (Rastratchiki, 1926), was printed in the journal Krasnaya Nov. In the satire of the new Soviet bureaucracy in the tradition of Nikolai Gogol, the protagonists are two bureaucrats "who more or less by instinct or by accident conspire to defraud the Soviet state". The novel was well received, and the seminal modernist theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski asked Kataev to adapt it for the stage. It was produced at the Moscow Art Theatre, opening on 20 April 1928. A cinematic adaptation under the title The Virtuous Sinner was filmed in 1931.
His comedy Quadrature of the Circle (Kvadratura kruga, 1928) satirizes the effect of the housing shortage on two married couples who share a room.
His novel Time, Forward! (Vremya, vperyod!, 1932) describes workers' attempts to build the huge steel plant at Magnitogorsk in record time. "The title...was taken from a poem by Mayakovsky, and its theme is the speeding up of time in the Soviet Union where the historical development of a century must be completed in ten years." The heroes are described as "being unable to trust such a valuable thing as time, to clocks, mere mechanical devices." Kataev adapted it into a screenplay, which was released as the eponymously titled film in 1965.
A White Sail Gleams (Beleyet parus odinoky, 1936) treats the Russian Revolution of 1905 and the Potemkin uprising from the viewpoint of two Odessa schoolboys. In 1937, Vladimir Legoshin directed a film version, which became a classic children's adventure. Kataev wrote its screenplay and took an active part in the filming process, finding locations and acting as a historical advisor. Many of his contemporaries considered the novel to be a prose poem.
During the 1950s and 1960s Kataev edited the magazine Yunost (Youth), publishing some of the most promising literary talent of the young generation, including Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Bella Akhmadulina.