Oleg Pavlov
Biography
Oleg Pavlov was born in 1970 in Moscow. Published when he was 24, Pavlov’s first novel Military Apologue was immediately acclaimed by critics and his peers alike and was shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize in 1995. Pavlov won the Russian Booker Prize in 2002 for his third book Ninth Day Party in Karaganda: or the Story of the Recent Days.
Pavlov’s Russian trilogy is both an artfully contrived narrative deploying fictional techniques and an autobiography, which describes the depth to which Pavlov believes the Russian Army to have sunk. The protagonist of the story is a conscript facing multiple horrors at the beginning of his two years of military service. At times in the novel, the stupidity, neglect and the scale of the suffering make the modern conflicts in ex-Soviet peripheral territories look like an account from the trenches of World War I.
Pavlov is also the author of articles on literature and the historical and social aspects of life in Russia, as well as numerous essays. One of Oleg Pavlov’s recent novels Asystole (colloquially “cardiac arrest”) is a about the tragic essence of human life, the loneliness of the individual and the power of love. It reads like a confession, but it’s title makes it sound like a clinical diagnosis. The novel was published in 2009 and became, according to critics, one of the major literary events of recent times.
Books /selected/
Асистолия / Asystole (2010)
Степная книга / Book of the Steppe (2008)
Повесть последних лет / A Tale of Recent Times (2001)
Казенная сказка / A Military Tale (1999)
Prizes and awards
2010 - Shortlisted for the Big Book Prize
2002 - The Russian Booker Prize
2002 - Shortlisted for the National Bestseller Prize
2001 - Oktyabr Prize