Viktor Astafyev - Biography

Biography

Viktor Astafyev was born in the village of Ovsyanka near Krasnoyarsk on the bank of the Yenisei river and spent much of his childhood in an orphanage.

He was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1942. He was seriously wounded fighting the Germans during the German-Soviet War and after his discharge in 1945 he lived in different regions of Russia including Urals, Chusovoy near Perm and Vologda doing various jobs such as locksmith and smelter.

In 1953 Astafyev published his first collection of stories dedicated mostly to the experience of Russian soldiers and civilians during the German-Soviet War.

After 1962 he became a professional writer authoring realistic often critical of the Soviet regime novels about the war and the Joseph Stalin era. His criticism of the Soviet times gained him popularity.

In the mid-1980s, he became embroiled in significant controversy over his writings followed by accusations of chauvinism and xenophobia when the public learned, through samizdat, about the correspondence between the literary historian Natan Eidelman and Astafyev that had been provoked by alleged racist overtones in Astafyev's work Sad Detective and his The Catching of Gudgeons in Georgia (both 1986), which rudely ridiculed Georgians. At the 8th USSR Writers Union Congress in the summer of 1986, Georgian delegates urged the author to apologize publicly for his insult to the Georgian nation; when he refused, they walked out in protest. In October 1993, he signed the Letter of Forty-Two.

In 1999, his novel Jolly Soldier, which portrayed the horrors of the Soviet Army was met with extremely adverse reaction, which may have brought about a heart failure.

David Gillespie summed up his career as follows:

Astafyev has always been a highly individual writer who conforms to no movements or stereotypes.... He has always remained true to himself, and has retained a certain hard-edged integrity. His novel Prokliaty i ubity is a gritty, typically uncompromising picture of war, with many naturalistic descriptions in a style the author has developed since the cathartic Pechal'nyi detektiv. Astafyev remains very much a writer who refuses to be easily categorized: he is neither a Village Prose Writer, nor a writer of "war prose", nor a writer who explores the mistakes of the recent Soviet past. At the same time, he is all of these. Capable of surprising and even shocking his reader, Astafev maintains a deep lyrical sense that has produced what Eidel'man called "the best descriptions of nature for decades". More than any other writer living in Russia today (with the possible exception of Solzhenitsyn), he is a writer who examines man as subjected to and moulded by the total Soviet experience.