SOURCE: “The Rise of Short Fiction,” in Soviet Russian Literature since Stalin, Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 156-61.

In the following excerpt, Brown provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Kazakov's short fiction.

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The short stories of Yuri Kazakov, possibly the best that were written in Russia in the fifties and sixties, represent a revival of the artistic tradition of such classical writers as Turgenev and Chekhov. The beauty and concrete precision of his language, his stylistic economy and sense of measure, and the emotional profundity and poetic suggestiveness of his narratives seemed new and refreshing in the Soviet context, but also seemed to herald the restoration of precious Russian literary values.

Kazakov was born in Moscow in 1927. He early became a musician, but he also began publishing stories in 1952 and completed the Gorky Literary Institute in 1958. Most of his works are set in rural areas of central Russia...