Valentin Rasputin

Valentin Grigoryevich Rasputin was a Russian writer, publicist, and public figure.

Field of activity: prose writer, playwright Years active: 1966—2015 Genre: Socialist realism Debut: The Place Near the Sky (1966)

Valentin Grigoryevich Rasputin was born on March 15 in the village of Ust-Uda, Irkutsk Oblast, into a peasant family. From the age of 2 he lived in the village of Atalanka in Ust-Udinsky District (later it was included in the flood zone after the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station). He graduated from the local primary school and was forced to leave home alone and travel 50 kilometers to the secondary school (this period is described in the famous story "French Lessons," 1973).

After school he entered the Faculty of History and Philology at Irkutsk University. As a student he became a freelance correspondent for a youth newspaper. One of his essays attracted the attention of the editor. Later, this essay, under the title "I Forgot to Ask Leshka," was published in the almanac Angara (1961).

He graduated from the university in 1959 and worked for several years at newspapers in Irkutsk and Krasnoyarsk, often visiting the construction sites of the Krasnoyarsk Hydroelectric Power Station and the Abakan-Tayshet railway line. Essays and stories about what he had seen later became part of his collections Campfires of the New Cities and The Place Near the Sky.

In 1965 Rasputin showed several new stories to Vladimir Chivilikhin, who had come to Chita for a meeting of young Siberian writers and became the young prose writer's "godfather." In 1967 the first book of Rasputin's stories, A Man from This World, was published in Krasnoyarsk.

The writer's talent fully emerged in 1970 in the novella Fare