Dmitry Galkovsky

Dmitry Yevgenyevich Galkovsky (Template:Lang-ru; born 4 June 1960) is a Russian novelist, essayist, philosopher, blogger, and author of the monumental novel-treatise The Infinite Deadlock (Бесконечный тупик).

Biography

Galkovsky was born in Moscow. His father was an engineer. His mother was a tailor. He graduated from school No. 51 in Moscow in 1977. He began his career as an air compressors fixer at the Likhachev Automotive Factory between 1977 and 1980. In 1980 he was also briefly employed as a lab assistant at Malinovsky Military Academy of Armored Forces. Galkovsky graduated from Moscow State University with the degree in philosophy. Between 1981 and 1990, he earned a living by selling samizdat and literary contraband of books, banned in USSR.

His magnum opus, the novel-treatise The Infinite Deadlock (Бесконечный тупик), comprises a multilayered commentary to an initial text addressed to the Russian national character and the philosopher Vasily Rozanov, consisting of fifteen hundred hand-written pages. It was partly published in both the liberal journal Novy Mir and the nationalist periodical Nash Sovremennik (Наш Современник) and produced immence interest and polemics in the press. In the book on Russian postmodernism Galkovsky was called "a genius of abjection" for his agressive sarcasm interpreted by many readers as feeble-mindedness. Galkovsky self-published his novel in full in 1997.

In ninetees Galkovsky compiled a sarcastic anthology of the worst pieces of Soviet poetry, titled Utkorech (Duckspeak) first published online in 1997 and in paper version in 2002. Two books of his essays, articles, interviews etc, Propaganda and Magnit followed in 2003-2004. Many of his short stories (Svyatochnye Rasskazy and Skazki Druga Utyat series) were published in online and offline media.

In 2003 he started a Livejournal blog, covering wide range of topics in history, culture and politics, and gaining recognition in the Russian blogosphere. In 2007 he produced a second edition of his novel at a publishing house that he expressly founded for that purpose.

He is also the author of "Friend of Ducklings" (Друг Утят) film script, and leader of Ducklings movement, a group of several hundreds MMOG players and bloggers, said to aim at planetary domination through dominating in multiplayer online games.. Unfortunately, a complicated language structure of his texts and their rooting in Russian literature tradition makes them very difficult for English translation. Nevertheless, there is always a hope for a proper translation.

Philosophy

Galkovsky energetically denies being a philosopher as well as the relevance of philosophy by itself in XXIst century. Yet, here and there he drops that his blog is a kind of a Socratic dialog. He believes that the objective of such a dialog is to put a reader into an "existential situation" by disrupting any popular mental cliche. Usually he does this by advocating seemingly indefendable issues, for instance that "USSR was a British colony under disguise" or that "Russia did not exist before XVIIth century" and defends such aberrant theses with admirable brillianсy. Probably, he believes that this is the only way to revitalize "rational thinking in Russian" which is "almost impossible" and "never existed" with some exceptions shortly before 1917 disappeared during the Russian revolution.

Awards

"Anti-Booker" literary prize of 1997; declined to accept the monetary award.

Links

• Virtual server of Dmitry Galkovsky
• "Utinaya Pravda" («Утиная ПРАВДА»), the site of Dmitry Galkovsky's Publishing House
• Fan site dedicated to Dmitry Galkovsky
• Galkovsky's LiveJournal blog
• Report of the 1997 Russian Booker and Antibooker Awards