Yury
Trifonov
Yury Valentinovich Trifonov (Russian: Юрий
Валентинович Трифонов; August 28, 1925 - 28
March 1981) was a leading representative of the
so-called Soviet "urban prose", a 1970s movement
inspired by the psychologically complicated
works of Anton Chekhov and his 20th-century
American followers.
Trifonov was born in the luxurious apartments on
the Arbat Street and spent his whole life in
Moscow. After his father, Valentin Trifonov, was
purged by Stalin in 1937, his family moved from
the famous House on Embankment (just across the
river from the Kremlin), into a sordid
kommunalka.
Trifonov attended a literary institute between
1944 and 1949. His first novel, The Students
(1950), won him the Stalin Prize. Trifonov's
subsequent works treated such topics as moral
ambivalence of Soviet intelligentsia and tragic
vicissitudes of Cossackdom during the Russian
Civil War.
Trifonov's best regarded and most widely read
pieces are half a dozen "Muscovite novellas":
Exchange (1969), Preliminary Conclusions (1970),
The Long Good-Bye (1971), Another Life (1975),
and (most importantly) House on the Embankment
(1976). These works are ranked among the most
stylish, richly textured and aesthetically
satisfying written in the Soviet period.
