SOURCE: “Yurii Kazakov,” in Major Soviet Writers: Essays in Criticism, edited by Edward J. Brown, Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 321-32.

In the following essay, originally published in 1964 as the introduction to Selected Short Stories, Gibian surveys the defining characteristics of Kazakov's fiction and praises their novelty and modernity in light of his time and setting.

Despite the slimness of his works, Yurii Kazakov has already become an author watched by those Russians who are most keenly interested in contemporary fiction. He has not yet won such a mass following as that of Konstantin Simonov: his works do not compare in breadth (and, one might add, poundage) with Mikhail Sholokhov's, nor has Kazakov established himself as a widely known public figure. But he is being read with intense interest, especially in literary and intellectual circles, and his followers regard him as an unusual, perhaps unique, writer on the Soviet...