Yury Trifonov
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Yury Valentinovich Trifonov (Russian: Юрий Трифонов; August 28, 1925-1981) 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. As one of his critics noted, "Yuri Trifonov's prose may serve as a university course on Soviet civilization".
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 USSR State 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.
