Makanin
The author
Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the ‘European' side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin's love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has remained in Moscow ever since.
After attending a film course in 1963, however, Makanin's interests took a more literary direction and he began to write. His short stories quickly made his name amongst Russian intelligentsia circles and his first novel, ‘Прямая линия' (The Straight Line), appeared in 1967. With the end of Khrushchev's ‘thaw' in the late 1960s, Makanin fell out of favour and was largely ignored by Soviet literary critics for the next twenty years. From the 1980s onwards, however, he was increasingly ‘re-discovered' by a new generation of critics and writers. In 1993 Makanin won the Russian Booker Prize for ‘Стол, покрытый сукном и с графином посередине' (‘Baize-covered Table with Decanter'), in 1998 the Pushkin Prize and, in 1999, the State Prize of the Russian Federation.
From official opprobrium to the highest state honour, Makanin has evolved a highly original type of narration characterized by a montage of plot fragments, dialogues, philosophical speculations, dreams and legends, often arranged with gaps in space and time.
The text