Stories

The writer Yuriy Kazakov passed away when he was only 55. He died in Moscow in November 1982. At that time, at the public memorial service, the writer Fyodor Abramov was the first to say: “We all have to understand what’s happening today. A classic has died!”

Yuriy Kazakov’s works entered school curricula and anthologies, were translated into many languages of the world. In honor of the writer, a literary prize for the best short story was established. In 2008, in Moscow, on the wall of the Arbat house where Kazakov lived his life, a memorial plaque was solemnly installed.

Everyone remembered the words of his friend, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “Yuriy Kazakov belonged to those who always taught people freedom, conscience, and love for the Motherland.” And long before that, the writer himself once wrote in one of his essays-monologues “On the Courage of a Writer”: “You don’t have the power to rebuild the world the way you want. But you do have your truth and your word. And you must be courageous three times—so that, despite your misfortunes, failures, and setbacks, you still carry joy to people and go on endlessly saying that life must be better… When a writer sits down at a blank sheet of paper, so many people turn against him, so unbearably many, so everyone calls him, reminds him of himself—and he must live some kind of his own, invented life. Some people whom nobody has seen, but they are still as if alive, and he must think of them like his own close ones. And he sits, looks somewhere out the window or at the wall, sees nothing, and sees only an endless sequence of days and pages behind and ahead—his failures and retreats—those that will be. And it’s bad and bitter for him. And nobody can help him, because he is ALONE.”