Leonid Yuzefovich
Genres
Contemporary Fiction, History & Politics
Biography
Leonid Yuzefovich was born in 1947 in Moscow, and spent his childhood and youth in the Urals. He graduated from the History Faculty of Perm University and became an officer in the Soviet Army, serving in Buryatia and Mongolia. His experiences at that time led him to develop an interest in Mongolian history and Buddhism. Since 1984 he has lived in Moscow.
The holder of a PhD in history, Yuzefovich worked for many years as a school history teacher and did not start writing in earnest until late in life. Since then, however, he has authored the novels Prince of the Wind, Rough Riders, Kazaroza, Cranes and Dwarves and others, as well as the historical investigations An Ambassador’s Road (about Russian diplomatic etiquette in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and Sovereign of the Wilderness (a biography of one of the most intriguing figures in Russian history, R. F. Ungern von Sternberg, who drove Chinese troops out of Mongolia in 1921), and numerous film scripts, some based on his own novels, four of which have been adapted for the big screen.
Yuzefovich's most prominent recent success is Cranes and Dwarves, winner of the 2009 Big Book, a tour-de-force which unfolds in three settings: present-day Mongolia, Russia in 1993, and the seventeenth century. In all three parts, the main character is a trickster or impostor; in essence, one hero in three different guises. Yuzefovich sets out to demonstrate the limitations of the concept of the 'self' and show that all of us, regardless of our location in time and space, overlap into one another. One critic has accurately described Cranes and Dwarves as ‘a picaresque novel with Buddhist motifs’. The author particularly associates this erosion of the boundaries of the individual, and the emergence of two-faced tricksters, with times of social unrest and epochal change: in so doing he locates Russia’s turbulent 1990s within the sweep of world history.
Yuzefovich has been published in Germany, France, Poland, Italy, and Spain, and his short stories The Butterfly and The Storm have been translated into English. He is the winner of the National Bestseller Award (Russia, 2001), the Big Book Prize (Russia, 2009), and the High Calibre Prize (Poland, 2007).
Prizes and awards
| 2009 | The Big Book Award (Cranes and Dwarves / Журавли и карлики) |
| 2007 | The High Calibre Prize, Poland |
| 2003 | Shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize (Kazaroza / Казароза) |
| 2001 | The National Bestseller Prize (Prince of the Wind/ Князь ветра) |
Books
- Cranes and Dwarves / Журавли и карлики, 2009
- Kazaroza / Казароза, 2002
- Rough Riders’ / Песчаные всадники, 2001
- Prince of the Wind - Князь ветра, 2001
- House of Dates / Дом свиданий, 2001
- Arlecino's Costume / Костюм Арлекина, 2001
- The Most Famous Imposters / Самые знаменитые самозванцы, 1999
- The Triumph of Venus / Триумф Венеры, 1994
- The Sign of Seven Stars / Знак семи звёзд, 1994
- Sovereign of the Wilderness / Самодержец пустыни, 1993
- 'Espero' Club / Клуб «Эсперо», 1990
- Hunting with the Red Gyrfalcon / Охота с красным кречетом, 1989
- An Ambassador’s Road (Russian diplomatic etiquette in the XVI-XVII centuries) / «Как в посольских обычаях ведётся…»: Русский посольский обычай XV—XVII вв., 1988