Alexander Vampilov
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Alexander Valentinovich Vampilov (Cyrillic: Александр Валентинович Вампилов) (born 19 August 1937, Kutulik, near Irkutsk, died 17 August 1972) was a Russian playwright. His play Elder Son was first performed in 1969, and became a national success two years later. Many of his plays have been filmed or televised in Russian. His four full-length plays have been translated into English and Duck Hunting has been performed in London.
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[edit] Life
Vampilov was the fourth child of schoolteachers. He was of Buryat ancestry, and his father, Valentin Nikitich, was arrested for nationalist activity. The young Alexander taught himself guitar and mandolin, and his first comic short stories appeared in magazines in 1958, later collected as A Confluence of Circumstances under the name "A. Sanin". After studying literature and history at the Department of Philology at Irkutsk University, graduating in 1960, he turned to theatre. He was executive secretary of the local newspaper in Irkutsk from 1962 to 1964, and later formed an acquaintance with the experienced and popular dramatist Aleksei Nikolaevich Arbuzov.
The first production of Farewell in June in Moscow in 1966 was unsuccessful, but by the early 1970s he was becoming very well-known, and his humanity and insight has been compared with that of Chekhov[1].
He married in the early 1970s, and drowned in 1972, while fishing on Lake Baikal. Last Summer in Tchulimsk was his final play.
[edit] Works
- Farewell in June (Прощание в июне) (1966, rewritten 1970)
- The Elder Son (Старший сын) (1967)
- House, Overlooking the Field
- Provincial Ancedotes (1968, comprising the one-act plays An Incident with a Paginator and Twenty Minutes with an Angel)
- Duck Hunting (Утиная охота) (1970)
- Last Summer in Chulimsk (Прошлым летом в Чулимске) (1972)
[edit] Trivia
Asteroid 3230 Vampilov, discovered in 1972, is apparently named after him.
