Rid Grachev

Sergey Dovlatov and, most notably, Joseph Brodsky

Saint Petersburg into a single-parent family headed by his mother. Having lost her during the Siege of Leningrad, Rid spent eight years in an orphanage, the period he later described in his works numerous times. After graduating from the Leningrad State University in 1959, Grachev, a fluent French speaker, was involved in translating Antoine de Saint-Exupéry for Soviet readers, as well as writing a number of articles and essays on French literature. Later on, he started writing his own stories and soon became one of the most influential "young authors" in Leningrad, along with Andrei Bitov, Alexander Kushner and many others. Even though his short stories were denied publication again and again due to censorship, he gained fame as part of the "New Petersburg Prose" movement, with his fiction and essays being distributed by the Samizdat