Oleg Pavlov is a Russian writer and essayist, winner of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize.
Biography
Oleg Olegovich Pavlov was born on March 16, 1960 in Moscow. After graduation, he worked, was drafted into the army and served in the convoy troops of the Turkestan military district, and was commissioned for health reasons. Pavlov graduated from the Literary Institute and graduated from his correspondence department (prose workshop of N. S. Evdokimov).
The beginning of creativity and career of a writer
In 1994, in the magazine Novy Mir, he published his first novel The Treasury Tale, which brought the young author great literary success and recognition of his elder fellow writers, “living classics” Victor Astafyev and George Vladimov. Released three years later, the novel Matyushin’s Case was criticized. The story of the camp guard who became a murderer, told with utmost psychological certainty, was perceived as a challenge to the "cultural society" with its new intellectual freedom and morality. What Pavlov wrote about, and before that caused a lot of controversy, although the writer was far from any ideology, calling only for compassion. Even earlier, Literaturnaya Gazeta published on its pages the story "The End of the Century" about those who "are doomed in modern society only to death." The story was based on a real case: working in an ordinary hospital, Pavlov saw with his own eyes how the homeless people who were brought from Moscow streets were killed at the sanitation. However, the Christian pathos of his prose and journalism, exposing the world of human suffering to the utmost, sounded like a protest in which some saw a truthful testimony of life, while others saw it as a "black libel."
After the article “Total criticism” was published in the newspaper Zavtra in 1998, in which Pavlov more than sharply spoke about those “who lacked the talent, intelligence, and conscience to be artists, but who judge artists”, in the literary environment A significant reappraisal of his work took place.
The writer turned to autobiographical topics. During these years, his stories "Dreams of Myself", "Apples from Tolstoy", the novel "Schoolchildren", and the novel "In Godless Lanes" were published. The novel “Karaganda Nines”, published in 2001, became the new reason for disputes about his work, the final part of the trilogy “Tales of the Last Days” (translated into foreign languages “Russian Trilogy”). For this work, Oleg Pavlov, by unanimous decision of the jury, chaired by Vladimir Makanin, was awarded the Russian Booker Prize. But the nomination of the writer for the State Prize was blocked.
As a publicist, after Solzhenitsyn, who published “Russia in a Collapse, ” Oleg Pavlov was not afraid to set himself the same task in his first acutely social essays: “capture what we saw, see and experience.” Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn entrusted Pavlov with the publication and comments on part of the letters addressed to his foundation in the early 1990s - and he saw and showed this tragic panorama of folk life in his work Russian Letters. These essays and essays are included in the books Russian Man in the 20th Century and Gethsemane. At the same time, Pavlov came out with literary criticism, becoming the author of such works as The Metaphysics of Russian Prose, Russian Literature and the Peasant Question, and the collection Anti-Criticism.
But since 2004, the writer has withdrawn from participation in literary life, almost never published in the periodical press, and his name was surrounded by silence. Only a few years later his books began to be published at the Vremya Publishing House, in which the author's series Oleg Pavlov’s Prose has been published since 2007. After a long break in it in 2010, the new novel by Oleg Pavlov "Asystole" was released. According to critics, filled with many tragic situations in life, the novel causes an emotional shock, but nevertheless it became one of the main literary events and attracted the attention of readers, having stood at once several editions. This series was continued by the book “Diary of a Hospital Guard” published almost 16 years after writing - a chronicle of the admission department of an ordinary Moscow hospital, through which, as the annotation says, “probably thousands of human destinies passed before the eyes of its author.”
Laureate of literary awards of the magazines "New World" (1994), "October" (1997, 2001, 2007), "Banner" (2009).
In 2012, Oleg Pavlov was awarded the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize for confessional prose imbued with poetic power and compassion; for his artistic and philosophical searches for the meaning of human existence in borderline circumstances.
In 2017, he was awarded the Angelus Literary Prize, awarded to authors from Central Europe, whose work focuses on topics that are most relevant to the present day, to encourage reflection and deepening knowledge about the world of other cultures.
The writer's works were translated into English, French, Chinese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Hungarian, Croatian.
Member of the PEN Club (Word Association of Writers PEN Club). He taught at the department of literary mastery of the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky.
