Alexander Valentinovich Vampilov (Cyrillic: Александр Валентинович Вампилов) (19 August 1937, Cheremkhovo, near Irkutsk – 17 August 1972 at Lake Baikal [1]) was a Russian playwright. His play Elder Son was first performed in 1969, and became a national success two years later. Many of his plays have been filmed or televised in Russia. His four full-length plays were translated into English and Duck Hunting was performed in London.
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Vampilov was the fourth child in the family of schoolteachers. Нis father, Valentin Nikitich, was of Buryat ancestry, and his mother, Anastasia Prokopievna was Russian, daughter of Russian Orthodox Church priest. His father was arrested for alleged nationalist activity.
The young Alexander taught himself guitar and mandolin, and his first comic short stories appeared in magazines in 1958, later collected as A Confluence of Circumstances under the name "A. Sanin". After studying literature and history at the Department of Philology at Irkutsk University, graduating in 1960, he turned to theatre. He was executive secretary of an Irkutsk newspaper from 1962 to 1964, and later formed an acquaintance with popular dramatist Aleksei Arbuzov.
The first production of Farewell in June in Moscow in 1966 was unsuccessful, but by the early 1970s he was becoming very well known, and his humanity and insight has been compared with that of Chekhov[1].
He married in the early 1970s, and drowned in 1972, while fishing on Lake Baikal. Last Summer in Tchulimsk was his final play.
Asteroid 3230 Vampilov, discovered in 1972, is apparently named after him.