Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov, born Kirill Mikhailovich Simonov (, – 28 August 1979), was a Soviet author, war poet, playwright and wartime correspondent, arguably most famous for his 1941 poem "Wait for Me". Early years Simonov was born in Petrograd in 1915. His mother, Princess Aleksandra Leonidovna Obolenskaya, came of the Rurikid Obolensky family. His father, Mikhail Agafangelovich Simonov, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution of 1917 and died in Poland sometime after 1921. Konstantin's mother, Alexandra, remained in Russia with Konstantin. In 1919 his mother married Alexander Ivanishev, a Red Army officer and veteran of World War I. Konstantin spent several years as a child in Ryazan while his stepfather worked as an instructor at a local military school. They later moved to Saratov, where Konstantin spent the remainder of his childhood. After completing a basic seven-year education in 1930 in Saratov, he went into the factory workshop school (Fabrichno-Zavodskoe Uchilishche-FZU) to become a lathe-turner. In 1931 his family moved to Moscow. After completing his precision-engineering course, Simonov went to work in a factory, where he remained until 1935. During these years he changed his given name from Kirill to Konstantin because he could not pronounce the sound "r" with an aristocratic lisp. The first of Simonov's poems were published in 1936 in the journals Young Guard and October. After completing schooling at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in 1938, Simonov entered the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature. His time there was interrupted when he was sent as a war correspondent to cover the Battle of Khalkhin Gol of May–September 1939 in Mongolia. Simonov returned to the Institute in 1939. Works Simonov's first play, The History of One Love, was written in 1940, and performed on stage at the Memorial Lenin Komsomol Theater in Leningrad. He wrote his second play, A Lad from Our Town, in 1941. That same year he was impressed by Soviet resistance in this place, during which 39 German tanks have been destroyed in one day, and described this episode in The Living and the Dead trilogy. Studying war correspondence at the Lenin Military-Political Academy, Simonov obtained the service rank of quartermaster of the second rank. At the beginning of World War II Simonov received a job with the official army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Simonov rose through the army ranks becoming a senior battalion commissar in 1942, lieutenant colonel