Vitaly Alexandrovich Zakrutkin

Vitaly Alexandrovich Zakrutkin was a Russian Soviet writer and literary scholar. He was a laureate of the USSR State Prize and the Stalin Prize (third class). He was born on March 27, 1908, in Feodosia. His father was a schoolteacher. From the age of ten Vladimir worked in the fields. In 1929 the family moved to the Far East and settled at Zavitaya station.

In 1932 Zakrutkin graduated externally from the Blagoveshchensk Pedagogical Institute named after M. I. Kalinin. In 1933 he began to write. In 1936 he completed postgraduate studies at the Leningrad Pedagogical Institute named after A. I. Herzen and defended his candidate's dissertation. After that Zakrutkin headed the Department of Russian Literature at the Rostov State Pedagogical Institute, where he worked until 1941.

During the Great Patriotic War Zakrutkin served in the Red Army (RKKA), was a correspondent for army and front-line newspapers, and attained the rank of major. In the postwar years he worked as an associate professor at Rostov State University named after V. M. Molotov and at the Rostov State Pedagogical Institute. Vladimir Alexandrovich Zakrutkin died in October 1984. He was buried in the Kochetovskaya stanitsa on the Don, in the yard of his house. A museum is now located there.