The two volumes comprise 38 short stories and travel sketches describing Russians and parts of the Soviet Union which up to Kazakov's time (he died in 1982) had been almost untouched by that country's 20th century upheavals. The majority of his settings are the coast and forests adjoining the White Sea, peopled by hunters, fishermen, buoy-keepers, ancient peasants, children in the most halcyon moment of their youth, and among his memorable actors are not excluded even an occasional soulful dog or bear. Through the eyes of this new array of 'Russian originals' we return to forgotten ways of perceiving the world around us, of appreciating the essential miracle of our surroundings, the universe extending from the immediate and almost microscopic grain of sand or flower, out to the infinitudes of which we are a part. The sense of the two books is topical and universal: the degree of man's involvement in the harmony and natural processes of the world is an essential measure of his moral dignity. (That such natural processes included hunting, for instance, is a challenging thought in our environmentally-ideological and conservation-focused times.) In the classic style of the Russian short story Kazakov's narratives move at a leisurely pace and often end apparently inconclusively, but they never fail to induce a deeply reflective mood. A few of his tales do have an urban setting, but even those are suffused with a pastoral quality, contributed to by the inescapable presence of the seasonal and climactic envelopment of man's works; and too by nature's mind-borne continuities: for example, a suburban boy repeatedly imagining and remembering episodes in some once-glimpsed corner of Russia's backwoods. Such recollections, and more immediate contemplations of nature in his other stories, return and return like wistful sighs among the meanders of Kazakov's uncomplicated plots.
About the Author: Yuri Kazakov (1927-82) was born in Moscow's Arbat, the nearest thing, if it can be imagined, to a Montmartre-Bloomsbury annexe situated immediately next to the Kremlin. His family is described as of the working class, originally of peasant stock and recently immigrants to the capital. His father was arrested in 1933 and sent to the camps, and that blot on the family record appears to have been an impediment in the son's first, musical career. Nevertheless, Kazakov's conservatorium years were not wasted, for the influence of that musical training enhanced his writing, once he transferred his interest there. The lyricism of his language and his mastery of thematic development and imagery, so akin in their effect to tone poems, is striking in the original Russian and are a challenge and stimulus to any translator. The insecurity of his family situation, together with traumatic experiences in wartime Moscow during his youth, contributed to a focus on life's discrete and unrepeatable passing instants, that gave his writing a quality of gentle otherworldliness. He turned away from the official idealism, triumphalism and optimism of contemporary Soviet literature and, equally, from any commentary on or explicit interest in political affairs, directing himself instead to an exploration of solitude in the northern territorial margins of Russia, to journey physically and imaginatively among its removed individuals, unvisited micro-communities, and the awesome phenomena of its then still-unquelled spaces. A full biography of Kazakov has yet to appear. Most of what is known about him comes from short interviews, autobiographical notes, the reminiscences of colleagues, and lastly and importantly from what his own stories reveal: for his collected writings could well be subtitled "A Biographical Journey." The Soviet literary establishment, anything but pleased to discover how easy it was to restore thematic and stylistic continuities with the pre-revolutionary past, harried and to a large extent muted Kazakov, with the result that his art has still to receive the full measure of recognition it deserves even in his own country. Since his death, there has been in Russia a persistent, and at last productive, activism directed towards making his name better known. A decades-long agitation to have a plaque attached to the building in the Arbat where he lived and returned to between his wanderings has finally succeeded. A Kazakov Short Story Prize was instituted in 2002.