Some of his writings were not well received by the official press, as Kochetov was considered too "reactionary" even by Soviet standards of the 1960s.

Kochetov was born into a peasant family, the youngest of eight children, all but three of whom died of hunger or illness during the First World War.

[2] His impoverished parents were unable to care for him, and he left home in 1927, moving from Novgorod to Leningrad, where he graduated in 1931 from a technical school and worked thereafter as an agronomist, then as director of a Machine Tractor Station and of a state farm.

His next novel, The Brothers Yershov, was composed as a sort of counterpoint to Vladimir Dudintsev's Not by Bread Alone, but was criticized even in Pravda for exaggerations.

As a pro-Soviet figure, Kochetov worked for numerous years as a cultural functionary and maintained a militant communist attitude, always wary of liberal or pro-Western influences.

For example, when Ilya Ehrenburg's memoirs were published, Kochetov complained of certain writers "burrowing in the rubbish heaps of their crackpot memories.

[9] A number of parodies of the novel were written by Russian intellectuals and circulated in samizdat), e.g. «Чего же ты хохочешь?» (Why Are You Laughing Then?

Patricia Blake wrote of her 1962 interview with him:In appearance, Kochetov is anything but the rough-and-ready proletarian his novels evoke.

Except for his unpleasantly thin lips, he is a handsome man with fine features and a slim figure.

When he spoke about his early life I began to sense the private passions engaged in his battle against the new intelligentsia.

What can such a man feel about the young writers who have recently risen to fame by way of no harder school than the Gorky Literary Institute?