Leonid Yuzefovich - a famous domestic writer. He is a candidate of historical sciences, historian and screenwriter. He is the author of historical and detective novels. His most famous works are “Desert Autocrat” dedicated to Baron Sternberg, “Prince of the Wind”, “Cranes and Dwarfs”, “Winter Road”.
Writer Biography
Leonid Yuzefovich was born shortly after the war, in 1947. He was born in Moscow. However, his childhood and youth passed in the small village of Motovilikha, located in Perm.
At the age of 20, he took part in the work of a book publishing house called Contemporaries, which was based in Perm. True, those around did not upset this step.
In 1970, Yuzefovich became a graduate of the philological faculty of the local university. The future writer studied with the playwright Anatoly Korolev and the artist and writer Nina Gorlanova.
From 1970 to 1972, Leonid Yuzefovich served in the Soviet army on the territory of Transbaikalia. It was there that he first became interested in Mongolia, Buddhism, as well as the biography of Baron Ungern, who was a representative of an old German-Baltic family. Then Yuzhefovich wrote his first historical novel, which, however, still remains unpublished.
From 1975 to 2004, Leonid Yuzefovich worked as a teacher of history in various schools. He defended his dissertation on domestic diplomatic etiquette in the Middle Ages. In the mid-80s, he left for Moscow and St. Petersburg, where he initially continued to work as a history teacher.
Literary debut
The first book of Leonid Yuzefovich was published when he lived in Perm. A story entitled "Betrothal Bet" was published in the Ural magazine. Further, his creative career developed extremely unevenly. In the second half of the 80s, it was printed a lot.
He was especially remembered for his documentary novel and historical research of 1993. It was a book by Leonid Yuzefovich, “The Autocrat of the Desert.” As Victor Pelevin later admitted, he used this work when writing the novel "Chapaev and the Void," in which one of the characters is Baron Jungern.
This study is dedicated to one of the most odious figures of the White movement. The book tells about its origin, service during the war of 1914-1918, battles in the era of the Civil War in Transbaikalia.
Popularity
The real popularity came to the writer in 2001, when he released a series of historical detectives in which detective Ivan Putilin became the main character.
Literary critics speak highly of this work, inevitably comparing Yuzefovich with Akunin.
In 2002, the detective novel "Kazarosa" was released, the actions of which were transferred to Perm in 1920. He even made it to the finals of the prestigious Russian Prize Russian Booker.
In 2009, Yuzefovich received the Big Book Prize for his work Cranes and Dwarfs. The action of this work takes place simultaneously in three time layers: in Europe of the 17th century, in Moscow in 1993 and in Mongolia in 2004. A historian by the name of Shubin writes a series of essays about impostors, for example, about Timothy Ankudinov, an impostor who impersonated Shuisky’s son. A buddy of the historian geologist Zhokhov is trying to make money on commercial transactions after the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, after another failure, he hides outside the city, and soon mysteriously disappears. A few years later, Shubin came with his family to Mongolia to visit the ancient Erden-Dzu monastery, meeting there a person who simultaneously looked like both Zhokhov and Ankudinov.
"Winter road"
In 2015, a new work was published. This is the documentary novel "Winter Road" by Leonid Yuzefovich. In it, the author describes one of the undeservedly forgotten episodes of the Civil War that occurred in the Far East.
Leonid Yuzefovich’s "Winter Road" describes an epic confrontation between one of the army generals Kolchak Pepelyaev and the red partisan from Transbaikalia Strod, which unfolded in 1922-1923. This is a campaign almost unknown to contemporaries of the Siberian volunteer squad that advanced to Yakutia from Vladivostok.
The author and critics noted that the novel is based on real archival sources that Yuzefovich himself collected over the years. Both protagonists are very extraordinary historical figures even for a diverse national history. The white general Pepeliaev is known as a poet and truth seeker, and the red commander Ivan Strod is an anarchist who later became a writer. Their tragic confrontation unfolds in the midst of snowy Yakutia, this is a real story of love, life and death, which really took place in its time and is not fictitious.
In 2016, his novel won the Big Book and National Best Seller awards for the second time.
Total dictation
In 2017, it became known that it was Yuzefovich who will be the author of the All-Russian total dictation this year. This is a voluntary campaign for total literacy testing, in which thousands of Russians participate annually.
The famous historian and writer wrote three versions of the text for the dictation, in which he sang the beauty and splendor of St. Petersburg, Perm, Ulan-Ude and the rivers on which they stand.
Yuzefovich's works have been repeatedly filmed. Back in 1991, detective Viktor Kobzev, Detective of the St. Petersburg Police, was released, which became an adaptation of the novel The Situation in the Balkans. In 2005, a 3-episode film adaptation of “Kazarozy” by Alena Demyanenko appeared.
Also released were the serial films The End of the Empire and Detective Putilin, the thriller Vladimir Kott Silver Samurai, and the historical detective Sergei Snezhkin Contribution. For most of the paintings, Yuzefovich himself wrote the scripts.
Writer's Family
It is known that the writer is married. He has two children who have become famous people.
His son, Mikhail Vinogradov, became a musician, and his daughter, Galina Yuzefovich, is a well-known literary critic. She is a graduate of the Moscow University for the Humanities. She began to write literary reviews in 1999 on the pages of "Spark", "Vedomosti", "Results", "October" and "Banner".
In 2010, it was she who nominated the novel "The House in which" Mariam Petrosyan, and three years later, "Aunt Motya" by Maya Kucherskaya for the "National Bestseller" award.