Yuri Pavlovich
Kazakov
1927-1982
Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov was a Russian Soviet writer and screenwriter. He was born on August 8, 1927 in Moscow in a working-class family, the peasants of the Smolensk province. His adolescence fell during the years of the Great Patriotic War. Memories of this time, of the night bombing of Moscow, were embodied in the unfinished story “Two Nights” later. At the age of fifteen, Yu. P. Kazakov began to study music, first on the cello, then on the double bass. He graduated from a construction college, after which he decided to fulfill a long-term dream: he entered the musical college named after Gnessins in 1946, which he graduated from in 1951. In the late 1940s, Kazakov began writing poetry, including poems in prose, plays that were rejected in the editorial offices, as well as essays for the newspaper Sovetskiy Sport. He entered the Gorky Literary Institute in 1953. While studying at the Institute of Literature, he began to publish his first stories. His work in a small, rather than large, form subsequently made Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov one of the best stylists of Soviet literature. The Russian North occupied a special place in Kazakov’s works. Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov wrote that he always wanted to live in villages – in places of ancestral Russian settlements, in places where life is not hasty, but constant, hundred-year-old, where people are tied to the house by family, children, household, birth, habitual hereditary work and crosses on the graves of fathers and grandfathers. For many years, Yuri Kazakov kept the so-called “Northern Diary” (1961), where he described his impressions. The heroes of his stories were sailors and fishermen, Nenets nuggets, islanders – all of them are characters inhabiting the Far North. During Kazakov’s lifetime, about 10 collections of his short stories were published. In the last years of his life, Kazakov wrote little, most of his ideas remained in sketches. A memorial plaque is installed on the Arbat, on the house where he lived In memory of the outstanding writer in memory of the outstanding writer.
Address: Moscow, Arbat str., 30/3, building 1
