Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov (; August 8, 1927 – November 29, 1982) was a Russian author of short stories, often compared to Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin. Born in Moscow, he started out as a jazz musician, but turned to publishing his stories in 1952. He attended the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, graduating in 1958.
Biography
Reportedly, Yuri Kazakov was born to a worker's family in Moscow and grew up in the old Arbat area, which has today been turned into a tourist attraction but in the mid-1900s was the focal point of Russian culture. "The year when Yuri was born, 1927, was a time when the relative freedom of the 1920s was being replaced by the Red Terror of the 1930s [and] Yuri's father was arrested when the future writer was six [because] he had failed to inform on a man who described the horrors of collectivization in a conversation."
George Gibian has said that "Kazakov is worthy of note not because of any 'disaffection' or 'dissidence,' but because what he says about his haunting characters set against an impressively captured nature is penetrating, true and beautiful." According to Gibian, Kazakov is distinctive among Russian authors. His work has an intrinsic, intangible quality which makes it unmistakably his. His characters are charged with emotion and tend to have a keen sense of an aspect of nature. Some enjoy the beauty of the visual world, some the scents of the forest, some the sounds of music but all intensely and with heightened senses experience the world around them.
English translations
- The Hound (story), from Such a Simple Thing and Other Stories, FLPH, Moscow, 1959. from Archive.org
- Selected Short Stories, Pergamon Press, 1963.
- Going To Town and Other Stories, Houghton Mifflin, 1964.
- Arcturus the Hunting Hound: And Other Stories, Doubleday, 1968.
- Autumn in the Oak Woods: Short Stories, Moscow: Progress, 1970.
- Adam and Eve (story), from The Portable Twentieth Century Russian Reader, Penguin Classics, 2003.