Yuriy Mamleev

Yury Vitalyevich Mamleev is a Russian writer, playwright, poet, and philosopher. He is the winner of the Andrei Bely Prize (1991). He is President of the “Club of Metaphysical Realism of the Central House of Writers,” a member of the American, French, and Russian PEN clubs, and of the Writers’ Union, the Union of Literary Workers, and the Union of Playwrights of Russia. He is the founder of the literary movement of “metaphysical realism” and the philosophical doctrine of “Eternal Russia.” Mamleev’s works have been translated into many European languages.

He was born on December 11, 1931, in Moscow. In 1956 he graduated from the Moscow Forestry Engineering Institute with a degree in engineering. From 1957 to 1974 he taught mathematics in evening schools. But the main sphere of his activity was literature. His stories, novels, and philosophical essays circulated in Samizdat, since they could not be published by Soviet publishing houses. In the 1960s, many figures of the “unofficial culture” of that time gathered at his apartment in Yuzhinsky Lane. Among them were poets and artists such as Leonid Gubanov, Genrikh Sapgir, Lev Kropivnitsky, and Alexander Kharitonov, and later Venedikt Yerofeyev and many other now well-known representatives of the creative intelligentsia who distinguished themselves in art, philosophy, and literature. Because it was impossible to publish his works, Y. Mamleev emigrated in 1974 with his wife to the USA, where he taught and worked at Cornell University, gave lectures at other prestigious universities in the United States, and later, in 1983, moved to Paris, France, where he taught Russian literature and language at the Meudon Institute of Russian Culture, and then at the famous Institute of Oriental Civilizations in Paris. During the period of forced emigration, his works were translated into European languages, and his творчество won recognition in the West. After the change of regime in Russia, Yury Mamleev was among the first to return to Russia. Since the early 1990s, his books have been widely published in Russia. During this time (from the early 1990s to 2008),