He was born at
Makarovskaya near Vologda in 1923. His father was a civil servant. In 1941, he was drafted into the
Red Army and was sent to the front as a radio-operator. He was wounded twice; near
Stalingrad and, more seriously, near
Kharkov. After his recovery, in 1944, he was demobilized and settled in the
Kirov Oblast, where he worked as a school teacher. In 1945, he relocated to Moscow and entered the
All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography. A year later, he transferred to the
Maxim Gorky Literature Institute; graduating in 1951. He had begun to write while still a student and, from 1948 to 1953, published several stories in
Ogonyok. He became a professional writer in 1955, during the first wave of
Nikita Khrushchev's
destalinization. Most of his works faced some degree of censorship and many were not published until the
Perestroika period. His novel
Assassinating Mirages (
Pokushenie na mirazhi) (written 1979-1982), which was critical of the Soviet state, remained unpublished until 1987 . After 1964, he served on the editorial board of the journal ''''. In 1966, he was one of the signatories to the "", opposing
Brezhnev's plans to rehabilitate
Stalin. In 1967, he became a board member at the
Union of Soviet Writers. Tendryakov as a writer was a foremost ethicist, and most of his works revolve around the problems of moral choice. Thus, his most famous novella "Three, Seven, Ace" (Тройка, Семерка, Туз) is about an ordinary citizen's fear to speak up and save an innocent man from a murder conviction. His novella "Potholes" (Ukhaby) describes an accident victim's life being sacrificed to blind adherence to rules and regulation. His novel
Assassinating Mirages is Tendryakov's masterpiece, containing a lifetime of reflections on issues of ethics, violence, cruelty and difficulty of moral choice (the novel's plot revolves around a physicist's attempt to analyse History by creating a computer model of it, then removing the figure of
Jesus Christ from the equation and studying the differences that result. The answer comes as a complete surprise.) Tendryakov died of a stroke in Moscow in 1984, a year before the beginning of
Perestroika. ==Works==