Vladimir Tendryakov

Vladimir Tendryakov
Born December 5, 1923
Makarovskaya, Russian SFSR
Died August 3, 1984 (aged 60)
Moscow, Soviet Union

Vladimir Tendryakov (Russian: Влади́мир Фёдорович Тендряко́в) (December 5, 1923 – August 3, 1984) was a Soviet short story writer and novelist.

Biography

He was born at Makarovskaya near Vologda in 1923. His father was a civil servant. He studied at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. He started writing in the late 1940s and graduated with a degree in literature in 1951. He became a professional writer in 1955, during the first wave of Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization. His novel Assassinating Mirages (Pokushenie na mirazhi) (written 1979-1982), which was critical of the Soviet state, remained unpublished until 1987 , when censorship was eased during perestroika.

Tendryakov as a writer was a foremost ethicist, and most of his works revolve around the problems of moral choice. Thus, his most famous novella "Three, Seven, Ace" (Тройка, Семерка, Туз) is about an ordinary citizen's fear to speak up and save an innocent man from a murder conviction. His novella "Potholes" (Ukhaby) describes an accident victim's life being sacrificed to blind adherence to rules and regulation. His novel Assassinating Mirages is Tendryakov's masterpiece, containing a lifetime of reflections on issues of ethics, violence, cruelty and difficulty of moral choice (the novel's plot revolves around a physicist's attempt to analyse History by creating a computer model of it, then removing the figure of Jesus Christ from the equation and studying the differences that result. The answer comes as a complete surprise.)

Tendryakov died in Moscow in 1984, a year before the beginning of perestroika.

Works

English translations

In Russian

Notes

External links