Background
Aleksei Pavlovich Bibik was born on October 5, 1887, in Kharkivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine. He was the son of a metal turner.
Aleksei Pavlovich Bibik was born on October 5, 1887, in Kharkivs'ka Oblast', Ukraine. He was the son of a metal turner.
Starting at the age of nine, Aleksei Pavlovich learned basic literacy at a privately owned school before enrolling in a regular city primary school in Kharkov. After completion, he entered the final (fifth) year of a two-class Church parish school. Hoping to continue his education further, Aleksei Pavlovich enrolled in a railroad technical school. But when his father fell ill he had to return home and enter instead the Kharkov locomotive railway workshop as an apprentice metal turner.
Aleksei Pavlovich later moved to Taganrog, on the Sea of Azov, where he found work in the railroad shops. The death of his father in 1898 forced him to return home once again to his family in Kharkov and to work as a turner on the railroad.
Returning to work in the Kharkov railway workshops, Aleksei Pavlovich joined the local Menshevik organization and, in 1906, was a member of the Menshevik delegation to the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the RSDRP in Stockholm. He would for many years remain an activist in the Menshevik movement, frequently changing jobs (from 1905 to 1917 he worked variously as a turner, draftsman, machinist, carpenter, statistician, and even land surveyor and moving to different cities, partly in order to avoid arrest.
Aleksei Pavlovich began writing during his first exile in Vyatka Governorate. His stories appeared in print starting in 1901: in provincial newspapers, in left-wing magazines, in the Menshevik press, and in a collection of his stories published in 1905. While working as a draftsman in a factory in Voronezh in 1910, he completed a novel, which he began writing in 1906, about workers' lives and struggles. Called K shirokoi doroge (To the Open Road), it was first published in 1912, with the help of the Marxist literary critic V. L. L'vov-Rogachevskii, in the socialist magazine Sovremennyi mir (Modern world) and reprinted as a book in 1914.
By 1920, however, Aleksei Pavlovich had abandoned Menshevism and politics altogether. He revised his first novel more in line with Communist notions about the labor movement and completed a second novel that was published in 1922.
For the next few years, Aleksei Pavlovich abandoned literature as well and returned to work in the industry and as an agronomist. He resumed writing only in 1925, publishing a number of stories and plays. After 1932, he was able to quit work and work exclusively as a writer, though from 1936 until 1957, no works by Bibik were published.
In the late 1890s, Aleksei Pavlovich joined an underground workers’ circle and soon after joined the local social democratic organization in Kharkov. In 1900 he was arrested for his political activities and for organizing a strike in his workshop, and exiled for three years to Viatka province, near the Ural mountains. At the end of his exile in 1903, Aleksei Pavlovich was again arrested, this time for propaganda among the local peasantry and for organizing a socialist circle, for which he was exiled for five years to the Siberian north (Arkhangelsk province), though he was freed in the 1905 amnesty.