Vladimir Uflyand Archive

Vladimir Uflyand is part of the first “Thaw” generation of Leningrad unofficial literature. In the late 1950s, he joined a circle of authors traditionally known as the “philological school” and was friends with Joseph Brodsky and Sergei Dovlatov. As with many of his contemporaries, his first publications were not official but in tamizdat and samizdat (he was one of the authors of the legendary typewritten almanac Sintaxis (1959–1960)). However, for the generation that began writing during the Thaw the division into “official” and “non‑official” was not yet a given. The same texts could be published in the Soviet Union and also be distributed through typewritten copies, and their authors had the option to participate in conventional creative life. Uflyand was a children’s poet and author of puzzles for the Young Pioneer magazine Campfire, wrote songs for television and cinema, and was a literary translator. In the post‑Soviet period he was actively engaged in working with the legacy of his colleagues. He was the compiler of poetry anthologies by Alexander Kondratov, Sergei Kulle, Mikhail Krasilnikov, and Yuri Mikhailov and in 2006, together with Viktor Kulle, he produced a major anthology of work by the “philological school.” The Uflyand archive is very varied. The literary archive comprises poems, songs, plays, handwritten and typewritten drafts, printouts, and editorial cuts and proofs of samizdat selections and anthologies. There are texts and selections by Joseph Brodsky, Sergei Dovlatov, Alexander Kondratov, and Konstantin Kuzminsky and issues of the samizdat journals Chasy and Transponans. An important part of the archive is made up of books with authors’ inscriptions and autographs, and there is also a comprehensive collection of issues of Campfire magazine, where Uflyand worked from the 1970s. It includes private and business correspondence, ephemera (invitations and booklets from cultural events, visiting cards), several photo albums, and separate photographs. They depict not only Vladimir Uflyand and his family but also representatives of the literary and artistic life of Russia and Russian émigré communities: Joseph Brodsky, Natalya Gorbanevskaya, Gleb Gorbovsky, Sergei Dovlatov, Mikhail Eremin, Mikhail Krasilnikov, Lev Losev, Boris Ryzhy, Mihail Chemiakin, Oleg Tselkov, and others. These materials enable us to make a detailed reconstruction of Uflyand’s biography from 1950 through the 2000s and to define the extent of his personal and professional contacts. Vladimir Uflyand (1937, Leningrad‑2007, St. Petersburg) was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, and artist. In the mid‑1950s he became part of a circle of authors traditionally known as the “philological school.” In 1959, he was arrested for hooliganism and spent four months in prison before being released on his own recognizance. In the 1960s, he studied in the history faculty at Leningrad State University, but did not graduate. He worked as a stoker, a laborer, and a stagehand. In 1963 and 1964, he worked in the technical section of the State Hermitage Museum. In 1964, he showed his works on paper at the 1st Exhibition of Technical Section Staff of the State Hermitage (The Riggers’ Exhibition).

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