Vsevolod Ivanov is largely remembered as the author of several novellas, in particular the Soviet classic Bronepoezd No. 14-69. Povest' (1922; play version translated as Armoured Train 14-69, 1933), and some short stories about the civil war in Siberia and Central Asia. Ivanov was one of the Serapionovy brat'ia or Serapion Brothers, a small circle of writers and poets that formed in 1921 in Petrograd and believed in the nonregimentation of literature. A prolific writer, he lived in Moscow from 1924 until his death in 1963, weathered various attacks on his writing, and indulged in his love of travel--often to Siberia and Kazakhstan, where he had spent his formative years--as well as to Europe and India.

Ivanov's literary development is an instructive case history of the effect of government control of the arts on the evolution of a creative artist in the Soviet Union. In the first half of the 1920s Ivanov impressed...