Ivan Melezh

Ivan Pavlovich Melezh was a Belarusian Soviet prose writer, playwright, and publicist.

Ivan Melezh was born into a peasant family. In 1938 he graduated with honors from school in Khoiniki, and in 1939 entered the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature, but was drafted into the army already in his first year.

In the summer of 1940 he took part in the liberation of Bessarabia and Bukovina. During the Great Patriotic War he fought near Nikolaev, Lazovaya, and Rostov-on-Don; in 1941 he was wounded. In 1942 he completed courses for political instructors and was sent to the 51st Rifle Division as a newspaper staff member.

After being wounded a second time, Melezh was assigned to Belarusian State University as a military training instructor. In 1944 he moved to Minsk together with BSU.

In 1945 Ivan Melezh completed the philology faculty of BSU by correspondence and entered postgraduate study. At the same time he worked in the editorial office of the magazine Polymya. After completing postgraduate studies, he worked at BSU as a senior lecturer in Belarusian literature.

From 1966 he was secretary, and in 1971–1974 vice chairman of the board of the Writers’ Union of the BSSR. Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the BSSR (1967–1976).

Published since 1930. In 1939 his first poem, “Radzime,” was published. Before the war, his poems appeared in the newspapers Literatura i mastatstva and Balshavik Palessya; in 1943 they were published in Buguruslanskaya Pravda.

He wrote his first stories in a Tbilisi hospital. In 1944 the story “Sustrecha ŭ shpitali” was published in the newspaper Zvyazda. In 1946 he issued his first collection of stories, U zavirukhu. In 1948 his second prose collection, Garachy zhniaven, was published. He was the author of the novel Minskoye napravleniye (about the Great Patriotic War and the postwar period), the prose collections Blizkaye