Alexander Stepanov

A. N. Stepanov was born on January 21 (February 2), 1892, in Odessa, into a family of an officer. In 1901–1903, he studied at the Polotsk Cadet Corps. In 1903, the family moved to Port Arthur. At the age of twelve, he took part in the defense of Port Arthur; his father, Nikolai Ivanovich Stepanov, commanded the battery of the Electric Cliff and later the Suvorov mortar battery on Tiger Peninsula. The twelve-year-old boy saw and remembered everything, serving as his father’s liaison, trying to be useful, and, together with other boys, hauling water on donkeys to the forward positions. He suffered a concussion and nearly lost his legs. After the fortress’s surrender, he and his father, among the prisoners of war, ended up in Nagasaki (the future writer remained in the fortress for all 329 days). His mother, Lydia Nikolayevna, was then teaching Russian at a girls’ gymnasium in Odessa, and it was there that Alexander Stepanov was sent from Japan together with the wounded. Under his mother’s influence, A. N. Stepanov loved books from childhood and learned to record his impressions; he kept diaries throughout his life. In 1913, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, but was soon called up into the army. He spent the entire First World War at the front. In 1917, A. N. Stepanov was sent to the Artillery Academy in Petrograd. He took part in the Civil War, in the defeat of Yudenich; together with a detachment of Putilov workers, he fought near Narva on February 23, 1918, commanded an artillery division, and fought near Rostov and Yekaterinodar. He began publishing in 1938. In the multi-layered novel Port Arthur and its continuation, the novel The Zvonaryov Family (1959–1963, unfinished), the heroism of Russian soldiers and officers in the 1904–1905 war is depicted. In 1944, the novel was republished in a large print run. In 1946, based on A. N. Stepanov’s novel, he and I. F. Popov co-wrote a play of the same title, which was staged in