Vladimir Tendryakov


Vladimir Tendryakov was a Soviet short story writer and novelist.

Biography

He was born at Makarovskaya near Vologda in 1923. His father was a civil servant. In 1941, he was drafted into the Red Army and was sent to the front as a radio-operator. He was wounded twice; near Stalingrad and, more seriously, near Kharkov. After his recovery, in 1944, he was demobilized and settled in the Kirov Oblast, where he worked as a school teacher.
In 1945, he relocated to Moscow and entered the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography. A year later, he transferred to the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute; graduating in 1951.
He had begun to write while still a student and, from 1948 to 1953, published several stories in Ogonyok. He became a professional writer in 1955, during the first wave of Nikita Khrushchev's destalinization. Most of his works faced some degree of censorship and many were not published until the Perestroika period. His novel Assassinating Mirages , which was critical of the Soviet state, remained unpublished until 1987.
After 1964, he served on the editorial board of the journal . In 1966, he was one of the signatories to the "", opposing Brezhnev's plans to rehabilitate Stalin. In 1967, he became a board member at the Union of Soviet Writers.
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" is about an ordinary citizen's fear to speak up and save an innocent man from a murder conviction. His novella "Potholes" 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
Tendryakov died of a stroke in Moscow in 1984, a year before the beginning of Perestroika.

Works

English translations