Yuri Dombrovsky

Yuri Dombrovsky (Russian: ???? ???????????; 1909-1978) was a Russian writer of Romani ethnicity who spent nearly eighteen years in Soviet prison camps and exile.

Dombrovsky was the son of a lawyer and fell foul of the authorities as early as 1932, for his part in the student suicide case described in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge. He was exiled to Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan where he established himself as a teacher, and which provided the setting for his novel The Keeper of Antiquities. This work, translated into English by Michael Glenny, gives several ominous hints as to the development of the Stalinist terror and its impact in remote Alma-Ata.

Dombrovsky had begun publishing literary articles in Kazakhstanskaya Pravda by 1937, when he was imprisoned again - this time for a mere seven months, having the luck to be detained during the partial hiatus between the downfall of Yezhov and the appointment of Beria.

Dombrovsky's first novel Derzhavin was published in 1938 and he was accepted into the Union of Soviet Writers in 1939, the year in which he was arrested yet again. This time he was sent to the notorious Kolyma camps in northeast Siberia, of which we are given brief but chilling glimpses in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge.

Dombrovsky, partially paralysed, was released from the camps in 1943 and lived as a teacher in Alma-Ata until 1949. There he wrote The Monkey Comes for his Skull and The Dark Lady. In 1949 he was again arrested, this time in connection with the campaign against foreign influences and cosmopolitanism. This time he received a ten-year sentence, to be served in the Taishet and Osetrovo regions in Siberia.

In 1955 he was released and fully rehabilitated the following year. Until his death in 1978, he lived in Moscow with Clara Fazulaevna (a character in The Faculty of Useless Knowledge). He was allowed to write, and was translated abroad, but none of his books was re-issued in the USSR. Nor was he allowed abroad, even to Poland.

The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (Harvill, translated by Alan Myers), the sombre and chilling sequel to The Keeper of Antiquities took eleven years to write. Dombrovsky was able to see it published before his death.

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