Alexei Polyarinov

Aleksey Polyarinov is a writer, translator, literary critic, and journalist. He was born on December 27, 1986, in the settlement of Voskhod in Kaluga Oblast, and spent his childhood in the settlement of Rassvet in Rostov Oblast. A neat little twist of fate: the two main places in his life turned out to be synonyms.

In 2008, he graduated from the Novocherkassk State Melioration Academy, where he received a handsome and utterly useless diploma with “hydraulic engineer” listed as his specialty. Over five years of study, he learned only one thing—that concrete hardens in 28 days—and still does not know what to do with this mysterious piece of knowledge. He currently lives and works in Moscow.

Aleksey Polyarinov calls his metanovel Center of Gravity (2018) his debut, while preferring to call the earlier Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (2013) his “zero-th.” In 2020, for Center of Gravity, he received the Readers’ Choice Prize of the NOS Award and was nominated for the FIKShN-35 prize. He wrote critical essays for Gorky, Afisha, and Pollen fanzine. Later all of the essays were collected into one volume and published as Almost Two Kilograms of Words (2019). His novel RIF (2020) is a story about the psychology of sects, totalitarian thinking, and how the past is preserved and passed down (or silenced) from generation to generation, how memory can be used as a weapon for one’s own selfish purposes, or as a resource for psychological healing and forgiveness. To write Rif, Aleksey Polyarinov studied more than twenty books on the psychology of sects and on how memory and forgetting work.

He is also known for, together with Sergei Karpov, translating into Russian David Foster Wallace’s most difficult novel Infinite Jest and Charlie Kaufman’s debut novel Antkind.

He collaborates with many online publications, including Esquire, G