Yury Trifonov - Career

Career

Trifonov attended a literary institute between 1944 and 1949. His first novel, The Students, was published in Novy Mir in 1950, and won him the Stalin Prize. His next novel, The Quenching of Thirst, appeared only in 1961.

In 1964–1965, Trifonov published the documentary novel The Campfire Glow, in which he described the revolutionary activities of his father and his uncle Evgeny (the excerpts of whose diaries are included in the narrative) before the revolution and during the civil war. Later, he wrote several stories which were publisher in the Novy Mir, including Vera and Zoyka (1966) and Mushroom Autumn (1968).

The cycle Muscovite novellas, started in the late 1960s, marked the beginning of the "Urban Prose", portraying the everyday lives of city dwellers. The cycle includes the novels The Exchange (1969), Preliminary Conclusions (1970), The Long Good-Bye (1971), Another Life (1975), and The House on the Embankment (1976). The latter novel describes the lives of the residents of the House on the Embankment in the 1930s, many of whom were killed during the Great Purge of 1937.

In 1973, Trifonov published the historical novel The Impatient Ones. The novel describes the assassination of Alexander II of Russia in 1881 by the People's Will party. It was nominated for Nobel prize by Heinrich Böll. Another historical novel, The Old Man, was published in 1978. The collection of short stories House Upside Down and the novel Time and Place were published after Trifonov's death in 1981. Trifonov's last major work, The Disappearance, was only published in 1987.

Trifonov was also known as a sports journalist. He published numerous articles on sports; for almost twenty years, he was a member of the editorial board of the magazine Physical culture and sports.