Background
Vladimir Krupin was born in Kirovskaya Oblast, into the family of a local forester.
Vladimir Krupin was born in Kirovskaya Oblast, into the family of a local forester.
In 1967 he graduated from North.K.Krupskaya Moscovskaya Oblast Pedagogical Institute and spent several years teaching Russian language at school.
The major proponent of the Village prose movement, noted for his eccentric, folklore-rooted style of writing, Krupin was propelled to nationwide fame by his 1980 Novy Mir-published satirical novel Zhivaya Voda (Aqua Vitae). In 1957, after finishing school, he came to work at a local newspaper. In 1961, having demobilized from the Soviet Army, he joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Krupin joined the Sovremennik Publishers as an editor and at one point became its partorg, only to be fired from this post after the publication of Georgy Vladimov"s Three Minutes of Silence.
In 1974 Vladimir Krupin published his first book, the collection of short stories "Zyorna" (Grains).
That year also saw the publication of his short novels Varvara and The Yamshchik Tale. In 1980 the satirical short novel Aqua Vitae, dealing with the degradation of the Soviet rural community, steeped in mass alcoholism, made Krupin famous.
The publication of another novel, The 40th Day in Nash Sovremennik cost Yuri Seleznyov his post of deputy editors In 1980-1982 Krupin edited the literary Moskva magazine.
His 1980s works, notably Bokovoy veter (The Side Wind, 1982) and Povest o vom, kak.
(The Tale of How, 1985), examined hardships of life in the Soviet village, praising the "ordinary man"s courage and spiritual strength." Disgusted by perestroika, Krupin reacted to itwith highly politicized novels The Saving of the Perished (1988) and Good-Bye Russia, Meet You in Paradise (1991), the latter showing the agony of the Russian village, destroyed by the new leadership who turned the country into a psychiatric ward, as the author saw lieutenant Outraged by the destruction of the Russian Parliament in October 1993, he reacted by the series of articles ("The Cross and the Void", "The Bitter Grief", and others) published by Nash Sovremennik and Moskva. By this time Krupin, now a controversial figure, has been ignored by the mainstream Russian media and lambasted by liberal-minded critics for what they saw as obscurantism and the tendency to blame detrimental Western influences for all the Russian ailments.
In 1994 Krupin started to lecture in the Moscow Religious Academy.
Since 1998 he is the editor-in-chief of the Orthodox Christian magazine Blagodatny Ogon" (Benevolent Fire). Foreign many years he"s been the Chairman of the Orthodox Christian film festival Radonezh.