SOURCE: “Iurii Kazakov: Overview,” in Reference Guide to Short Fiction, edited by Noelle Watson, St. James Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Pursglove provides a brief overview of Kazakov's short fiction, describing it as “allusive, ambiguous, and open-ended,” the opposite of much Stalinist prose writing of years previous.

Iurii Kazakov published no more than 35 short stories in all, and yet this small corpus of work epitomizes the literature of the post-Stalin “Thaw” period, ushered in by Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in February 1956. The mere act of writing a short story represented a major change; Stalinist prose writing had been dominated by long novels with “positive” heroes and enough space for the author to tie up all ideological loose ends. Kazakov's stories are the very reverse of this—allusive, ambiguous, and open-ended. His heroes and heroines are indecisive, unsure, vulnerable, and isolated, both physically and emotionally...