Emmanuil Kazakevich

Kazakevich continued with Lenin as a main character in another story, "Enemies", written in his last year, and it is likely that he was planning to bring them together within a larger novel about Lenin. However, his sudden passing away in the summer of 1962 meant that those plans were left unfulfilled.

During the fifties, Kazakevich reached high positions in the Soviet Association of Writers and was aligned with the efforts of de-Stalinization. He kept picking up potentially sensitive subjects, and during his last years may have been working on a major novel about Lenin during the revolutionary years. The short novel Sinyaya tetrad (The Blue notebook) appeared in 1961; it is set during Lenin's stay on the Karelian isthmus in the summer of 1917 and brings Lenin face to face both with ordinary people and with Grigory Zinovyev, who was still considered a traitor or at best a dubious figure at the time of writing. While Kazakevich, in the end, makes Lenin refute Zinovyev's fears and allegations, there is no attempt to show the latter as an evil or insincere person, which would have been a given for most Soviet writers at the time.

After 1945 Kazakevich began writing in Russian, and his debut novel Zvezda (The star, 1947, adapted into a film in 1949 (remake - film 2002)) was an instant success. The novel describes an army intelligence unit during WW2 and their raid behind enemy lines. The book showcases some of his later recurrent traits: the sharp, lyrical evocation of nature, the interest in moral conflicts and ambiguities, often relating to the transition between war and peace, the sense of humour and psychological observation. Many of his later stories are set during or shortly after the Second World War. The novella "In the Light of Day" (1960) explores ambiguities of guilt, bravery and memory as a soldier makes a visit to the widow of his fallen friend and unit officer.

Emmanuil Genrikhovich Kazakevich (Russian: Эммануи́л Ге́нрихович Казаке́вич , Yiddish: עמנואל קאַזאַקעװיטש ‎; February 24, 1913 – September 22, 1962) was a Soviet author, poet and playwright of Jewish extraction, writing in Russian and Yiddish.