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 leaving school, he worked, was drafted into the army and served in the escort troops of the Turkestan military district, was discharged for health reasons. Pavlov received his higher education at the Literary Institute and graduated from its correspondence department (seminar of prose by N. S. Evdokimov).
The beginning of creativity and the career of a writer
In 1994, he published his first novel, The State Fairy Tale, in the Novy Mir magazine, which brought the young author a resounding literary success and recognition from his older brothers in writing, the “living classics” Viktor Astafiev and Georgy Vladimov. The novel The Matyushin Case, which came out three years later, was criticized. The story of the camp guard turned murderer, told with the utmost psychological accuracy, was perceived as a challenge to the "cultured society" with its new intellectual freedom and morality. What Pavlov wrote about had caused a lot of controversy before that, 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 only to death in modern society”. The story is based on a real case: while working in an ordinary hospital, Pavlov saw with his own eyes how homeless people who were brought from Moscow streets died during the sanitation. However, the Christian pathos of his prose and journalism, which exposed the world of human suffering to the limit, sounded like a protest, in which some saw a truthful testimony of life, while others were "black libel".
After the publication in 1998 in the newspaper "Zavtra" of the article "Total criticism", in which Pavlov spoke more than sharply about those "who did not have enough talent, intelligence, conscience to be artists, but who judges artists", in the literary environment there was an indicative reassessment of his work.
The writer turned to autobiographical topics. During these years, his stories "Dreams of Me", "Apples from Tolstoy", the story "Schoolchildren", and the novel "In Godless Lanes" were published. A new reason for controversy about his work was the story "Karaganda Nines", published in 2001, - the final part of the trilogy "Tale of the Last Days" (translated into foreign languages "Russian Trilogy"). For this work, Oleg Pavlov was awarded the Russian Booker literary prize by unanimous decision of the jury chaired by Vladimir Makanin. But the writer's nomination for the State Prize was blocked.
As a publicist, after Solzhenitsyn, who published “Russia in a landslide,” in his very first acute social essays, Oleg Pavlov was not afraid to set himself the same task: “to capture what we saw, see and experience”. Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn entrusted Pavlov with the publication and comments on some of the letters addressed to his fund in the early 1990s - and he saw and showed this tragic panorama of people's life in his work "Russian Letters". These sketches and essays were included in the books "Russian people in the XX century" and "Gethsemane time". At the same time, Pavlov came out with literary criticism, becoming the author of such works as "Metaphysics of Russian Prose", "Russian Literature and the Peasant Question", a collection of "Antikritika".
But since 2004, the writer withdrew from participation in literary life, almost never published in periodicals, and his name was surrounded by silence. Only a few years later, his books began to be published by the Vremya publishing house, which, since 2007, has been publishing the author's series “Oleg Pavlov's Prose”. After a long break in it, in 2010, Oleg Pavlov's new novel "Asystolia" was released. According to critics, filled with many tragic life situations, the novel causes an emotional shock, but nevertheless became one of the main literary events and attracted the attention of readers, having gone through several editions at once. 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 lives have passed before the eyes of its author”.
Laureate of literary awards of the magazines "New World" (1994), "October" (1997, 2001, 2007), "Znamya" (2009).
In 2012 “for confessional prose imbued with poetic power and compassion; for artistic and philosophical searches for the meaning of human existence in borderline circumstances”Oleg Pavlov was awarded the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize.
In 2017, he was awarded the Angelus Literary Prize, awarded to authors from Central Europe whose work takes on the most pressing topics of today in order to stimulate reflection and deepen 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 Skills of the Literary Institute. A. M. Gorky.
Personal life and death of the writer
Oleg Pavlov was never married and had no children. All the writer's free time was occupied by creativity. On October 7, 2018, at the age of 48, Pavlov died, the cause of death was myocardial infarction. Farewell to the writer took place on October 9 at 12:00 in the Hospital Church of the Holy Blessed Tsarevich Dmitry in Moscow.
