Yuri Pavlovich Kazakov (; August 8, 1927 – November 29, 1982) was a Russian author of short stories, often compared to Anton Chekhov and Ivan Bunin. Born in Moscow, he started out as a jazz musician, but turned to publishing his stories in 1952. He attended the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute, graduating in 1958. Biography Reportedly, Yuri Kazakov was born to a worker's family in Moscow and grew up in the old Arbat area, which has today been turned into a tourist attraction but in the mid-1900s was the focal point of Russian culture. "The year when Yuri was born, 1927, was a time when the relative freedom of the 1920s was being replaced by the Red Terror of the 1930s [and] Yuri's father was arrested when the future writer was six [because] he had failed to inform on a man who described the horrors of collectivization in a conversation." "Kazakov went to a typical Soviet school in the center of Moscow." "When his father disappeared in the Gulag, the family lived in dire need, [but] Kazakov [continued to] stud[y] at an elite vocational school and the Gnesins music school where he played classical music on the double bass." "For a while he performed in orchestras, but eventually abandoned music." "In 1958 Kazakov graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute." "By this time he had already written and published several stories, which were appreciated by such established writers as Konstantin Paustovsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and Ilya Ehrenburg." It's been said that "the writer's early works displayed the influence of Russian classical literature, in particular the writer Ivan Bunin, who had emigrated following the revolution and began to be published in Russia widely again only following Stalin's death." At the end of the 1950s Kazakov traveled to the north of Russia, and the trip became the subject of several new stories. On the strength of a collection of these stories he joined the Writers' Union in 1958. The North remained one of the most important themes in his work, one to which he returned in more difficult times." However, the authorities adopted a critical attitude to the new writer and the central literary journals stopped publishing him in 1959. Kazakov emerged as a writer only thanks to the short period in recent Russian history known as the Thaw, but in the mid-1960s, this period gave way to stagnation in culture and public