Vladimir Orlov

Vladimir Viktorovich Orlov was a Russian prose writer and screenwriter, born on August 31, 1936, in Moscow, into a journalist’s family. He spent his childhood in evacuation in the Mari Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

From 1954 to 1959 he studied at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University. As a student, he took part in the development of virgin lands and completed his journalistic practice at the newspaper Krasnoyarsky Rabochy. Since 1959 he worked as a correspondent for Komsomolskaya Pravda at the construction sites of the Abakan–Tayshet railway line and the Sayano-Shushenskaya Hydroelectric Station.

The result of his work in Siberia was the cycle of essays “The Road Seven Centimeters Long” (1960). Later came his debut novel “Salted Watermelon” (1965), based on material from the Siberian “construction project of the century.” The novel was written under the evident influence of V. Aksyonov’s confessional prose, with its ironic hero, its “Remarque-like” lyrical conflict, and its hidden nonconformism. In 1965, the film “Taiga Landing Party” was made based on this novel.

After the publication in 1969 of the novel “After a Rain on Thursday”, Orlov left the editorial office and became a professional writer. In 1975, the novel “Incident in Nikolskoye” was published in the magazine Novy Mir. In 1980, the “fantastic-realist” novel “Danilov, the Violist” appeared, bringing the author instant fame and becoming the first in the trilogy Ostankino Stories. It marked the beginning of Orlov’s series of works in the vein of “fantastic realism,” associated in Russian literature with the names of N. V. Gogol and F. K. Sologub.

In the novel “Danilov, the Violist”, Orlov, continuing the