Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov

Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov (born August 28, 1925, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.—died March 28, 1981, Moscow) was a Soviet writer who managed to retain official acceptance of his work despite its anti-Stalinist overtones.

Trifonov’s father, a hero of the Russian Revolution of 1917, was executed during a political purge in 1938, and his mother was sent to a prison camp for eight years. Trifonov worked in an aircraft factory and then studied at the Gorky Literary Institute. His first novel, Studenty (1950; “Students”), won the Stalin Prize in 1951. Trifonov went as a journalist to Central Asia, where he reported on the building of the Karakum Canal, the subject of his novel Utoleniye zhazhdy (1963; “Thirst Quenching”). Much of his work during the 1960s appeared in Novy Mir, a periodical edited by his friend Aleksandr Tvardovsky. His later works, including Obmen (1969) and Dolgoye proshchaniye (1971), both of which were published under the title The Exchange and Other Stories in English, and Dom na naberezhnoy (1976; The House on the Embankment), were honest and fearless explorations of contemporary Soviet life. The newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta (“Literary Gazette”) accused Trifonov of being one-sided and unjust in his portrayal of the cynicism and opportunism fostered by the Stalinist system, but his works were immensely popular, some of them being adapted for stage and screen and several of them translated.