Salvation of the Lost

Vladimir Nikolayevich Krupin was born on September 7, 1941, in the village of Kilmez in Kirov Oblast, into a peasant family. His father worked in forestry. After finishing rural school, Vladimir Krupin worked as a fitter, a loader, and served as a rabselkor for the district newspaper.

After serving in the army, he entered the Moscow Region Pedagogical Institute named after N. K. Krupskaya, graduating from the faculty of literature and the Russian language. Later, Vladimir Krupin worked on Central Television, in various literary and art publishing houses, and taught at school. He was secretary of the board of the Moscow branch of the SP of the RSFSR and the SP of the USSR; a member of the editorial board of the magazine “Novy Mir,” and chief editor of the magazine “Moscow” (1989–1992). Since 1994, he has taught at the Moscow Theological Academy; since 1998, he has served as chief editor of the Christian magazine “Blessed Fire.”

With the beginning of “perestroika,” Krupin actively speaks from “state-patriotic” positions—both as a tendentious fiction writer (a novel-testament about the manners of the “sick,” defective, in Krupin’s opinion, creative intelligentsia and the atmosphere in the writers’ milieu—“Salvation of the Dying,” 1988; the novella “Farewell, Russia—See You in Heaven,” 1991, showing the agony of the Russian countryside at the end of the 20th century, when in Krupin’s homeland the order had been established that the writer identifies with the manners of a psychiatric hospital—an idea that also nourishes the novella “As Soon As That, So Immediately,” 1992, written in the form of notes by a psychiatrist), and as a publicist.