Grigory Adamov

Biography

Abram Gibs was born in Kherson, the seventh child of a poor Jewish timber factory worker. Expelled from a local gymnasium due to his family's inability to pay for the course, he started to earn his living by giving lessons of grammar and arithmetic. Parents were dreaming of him becoming a doctor, but at the age of 15 Abram Gibs joined first a radical youth circle, then the Kherson Bolshevik party organization.

In 1906 he was arrested and deported to the Arkhangelsk area. Having escaped from the settlement, he arrived at Saint Petersburg, then, as part of a Bolshevik envoy group, travelled to Sevastopol and took part in the operation the end result of which was the destroying of documents of the battleship Potyomkin mutineers' trial. Arrested for agitation among Russian Black Sea Fleet sailors, Gibs was sentenced to three years in jail.

In 1911, using the pen name Grigory Adamov, Gibs started contributing to the Kherson-based Yug (South) newspaper, of which he soon became the editor. After the 1917 Revolution Adamov joined the Narkomprod (where he became friends with future academician Otto Schmidt), then Goslitizdat publishing house, all the while writing for different journals, including Nashi Dostizhenyia (Our Achievements), edited by Mikhail Koltsov. As a correspondent for Za Industrializatsiyu (For Industrialization) newspaper Adamov travelled all over the country. It was during these voyages that he developed strong interest in science and new technology.

Literary career

In 1930 Adamov became a professional writer. His first short stories, belonging to the so-called 'close-range science fiction' genre (dealing with Solar energy and Earth power employment, artificial climate change, etc.), were published by Znanie-Sila (Knowledge is Power) magazine. In 1937 Conquerors of the Underground came out. This finely written novel rich with technical trivia and with a spy thriller element to it became popular with the young, technically minded Soviet readership.

Even more successful was Adamov's second novel, The Mystery of the Two Oceans (1939), a techno sci-fi/spy thriller telling the story of the Soviet wonder-submarine Pioneer, succeeding in its round-the-world mission despite imperialists' agents' attempts at thwarting it. While working upon it, Adamov became an expert in oceanography, having studied hundreds of scientific books and documents. While writing his third novel, The Ousting of the Ruler, he made a journey to the Russian Far North, so as to investigate his own idea of the possibility of warming the Arctic Circle area up (by artificially heating the Gulf Stream) and thus benefitting the Soviet economy. The novel was published posthumously, in 1946.

Grigory Adamov died on 14 June 1945, in Moscow.