In the atmosphere of scandal and provocation that has pervaded Russian literature in the last two decades, Andrei Dmitriev occupies an isolated position; not concerned with glory, he works in solitude and deep concentration, publishing rarely. Dmitriev's writings address above all the category of the sublime--a value completely obliterated in contemporary Russian culture--which he persistently reveals as inherent in the most prosaic events of everyday life. The sublime in his work is expressed only through the subtle and dramatically fragile shifts in communication between the human psyche, nature, and cultural tradition. Dmitriev's task is to present these fluctuations. He has developed an individual style that fuses sentimentalist and Romantic motifs with the art of psychological analysis, as inherited from the tradition of Russian realism. His work also draws on emphatically modernist elements such as estrangement, intertextuality, an amalgamation of diverse discursive layers, and mythol-ogism.

Dmitriev was born on...