Eugene Vodolazkin

Eugene Germanovich Vodolazkin (Евгений Германович Водолазкин) is a Russian scholar and author.[1] Born in Kiev in 1964,[2] he graduated from the Philological Department of Kyiv University in 1986.[3] In the same year, he entered graduate school at the Pushkin House in the department of Old Russian Literature under Dmitry Likhachov.[3] In 1990, he defended his graduate thesis ‘On Translation of “Chronicle of George Hamartolos”’.[4]

Vodolazkin has been awarded fellowships from the Toepfer Foundation and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He has written for First Things and been published in Plough.[5] Won the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literature Prize in 2019.[6][7]

Vodolazkin is considered to be the most important among contemporary Russian writers; his books are translated into many languages and receive international recognition.[8] His novel Laurus (Лавр) won the Russian Big Book Award as well as the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award.[9]

He lives with his family in St. Petersburg.

Vodolazkin was born in 1964 in Kiev, when it was still part of the USSR.[2] Though he is private about his childhood, he attended a school that focused on both Ukrainian and English languages, which he graduated from in 1981.[10] After graduating from secondary school, he went on to attend Kiev State University, where he studied philology.[11] Upon graduating, he applied to graduate school at the Pushkin House (known at the time as the Institute of Russian Literature),[10] and passed the entrance exam with an unusually high score.[3] The Pushkin House is where he met his wife, Tatiana Robertovna Rudi.[12] Vodolazkin defended his thesis in 1990, and when Dmitry Likhachov heard it he offered him a faculty position at the Pushkin House.[3]