Yevgeny Kharitonov

He wrote and directed a play, The Enchanted Island, for the Theater of Mimicry and Gesture in Moscow. He led the pantomime studio of the Moskvorechye Workers' Club, and choreographed the rock band Last Chance. He died of a heart attack on Pushkin Street in Moscow, one day after completing the manuscript of his play Under House Arrest, which would not be published until seven years after his death. He was buried in Novosibirsk and posthumously awarded the Andrei Bely Prize. Among the few works Kharitonov published openly during his lifetime were several translations of contemporary German language poetry, including that of the Austrian Ingeborg Bachmann. Most of his works were circulated in samizdat periodicals such as Hours, Bypass Channel, 37, and Mitin Journal. Kharitonov's work lies at the convergence of several currents in 20th-century Russian prose. His emphasis on the distance between author and lyric subject anticipates Victor Erofeyev and Vladimir Sorokin; and he shares with Pavel Ulitin (and with Proust and Joyce) a cryptographic, indirect approach to the encoding of emotion in events. He had a peculiarly acute awareness of the expressive properties of typewritten text. His preoccupation with typography, and his resulting mistrust of samizdat typists, may account for the fact that he typed all his manuscripts himself. It has also been conjectured that his frank descriptions of gay life so offended the typists' sensibilities that they refused to copy his manuscripts. Above all, Kharitonov is recognized as a founder of modern Russian gay literature, and arguably the most important gay Russian writer since Mikhail Kuzmin. His work is inseparable from his sexuality, its legal and cultural prohibition, and its psychological dimension.

Yevgeny Kharitonov studied at Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. The recorded working language is Russian. The field of work recorded is poetry, literature and film direction. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are theatre. Distinctions recorded are Andrei Bely Prize.

• Pantomime in the Instruction of the Film Actor (Пантомима в обучении киноактера) - Dissertation, 1972. • Tears on the Flowers (Слезы на цветах), 1993. • Under House Arrest (Под домашним арестом), 1988.