Yuri Mamleev, Russian author, Died at 83

  Writers

Yuri Mamleev was born on December 11, 1931, in Moscow, Russia and died October 26, 2015.

He was known as The author and philosopher.

Yuri Mamleev is a marginal figure in Russian literature.

He and his father were a psychiatrist and in 1937 he died in a prison camp.

Yuri Mamleev began to write in the late 50s when he worked as a teacher of mathematics in an evening school somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow.

Yuri read his short stories to a narrow circle of admirers which began to form around him.

Later, when his popularity increased, tapes of these readings were circulated amongst the Moscow cultural underground where they were listened to with enthusiasm and trembling.

He gradually became one of the mysteries of the metropolitan nonofficial culture; however, his fame was totally based on word of mouth: Yuri was so afraid of the KGB and of being sent to the madhouse that he never gave his texts to anyone to read (his fear was not without reason: during that time, one could be send to the madhouse for far more innocent things).

The book “Shatuny” was written in the late 1960s and the author’s readings of it circulated unofficially on audiotapes, making him famous in the cultural underground.

Yuri emigrated in the early 1970’s to the United States where he taught Russian literature at Cornell university.

In 1983 he moved to Paris, where, as one critic said, “he kept on frightening readers” by his strange stories.

Yuri’s works have been published in Samizdat and Russian emigre editions and translated into other languages.

For his book “The Sky Above Hell” he was admitted into the French Pen-club.

In 1989 a few of Mamleyev’s short stories were published for the first time in his fatherland, followed by three slim books.

It is rumoured that he is going to return to Russia and that he has already bought a flat in Moscow.

There are writers like Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin, whose works are influenced by Yuri Mamleev.

Yuri passes away at age 83 in October 2015.