Vladimir Dmitrievich Dudintsev was born on 16 July 1918 (29 July 1918, new style) in the town of Dupiansk, in the Khar'kov region of Ukraine, into a family of gentry stock. His father, Semen Nikolaevich Baikov, a captain of the White Army, was executed by Red Army troops in Khar'kov shortly after his son's birth, as was the boy's grandmother. Dudintsev's mother, an operetta singer, remarried. The stepfather, a land surveyor named Dmitrii Ivanovich Dudintsev, was a cultured man whose trips to the countryside--and detailed reports of these trips--became the first lessons in life and verisimilitude for the precocious boy.

In the late 1920s the family moved to Moscow. At the age of twelve Dudintsev tried his hand at writing fiction. He attended a literary circle for children under the direction of Isia Arkad'evich Rakhtanov. The boy's first poem was published in 1930 in Pionerskaia pravda (Pioneer Truth). During the next few years...