His four full-length plays were translated into English and Duck Hunting was performed in London and Washington DC (Arena Stage).

The young Alexander taught himself guitar and mandolin, and his first comic short stories appeared in magazines in 1958, later collected as A Confluence of Circumstances under the name "A. Sanin".

Valentin taught Russian language and literature in, and became director of, the high school in Kutulik, the regional center of the Irkutsk oblast, some thirty kilometers south of Alar.

The parents of Valentin's wife, Anastasia Prokopevna Kopylova, Prokopi Kopylov and Aleksandra Afrikanovna Medvedeva, were Russian.

Kopylov was a priest and teacher of religious law in a women's gymnasium, but after the Revolution he had to sweep streets and chop wood for a living.

He spent his childhood and adolescent years in the town of Kutulik, where the family lived in a room of the teachers' barracks, a log house that in earlier days had been a "forwarding point", the last place that prisoners would spend the night on their way to labor camps.

Only one piece, a dramatic scene entitled “Flowers and Years” (“Цветы и годы”), appeared under his real name.

Together, work for the newspaper and TOM (Творческое обединение молодых), the Young People's Creative Union, served as a second university for Vampilov, training him to observe life and compelling him to write.

TOM included a number of young men not unlike Vampilov—Valentin Rasputin, Vyacheslav Shugaev, Dmitri Sergeev, Yuri Skop—with whom Vampilov became friends.

In 1964 he left Soviet Youth, contributed to two collections of stories and sketches by Irkutsk authors, and made his debut as a playwright with the publication of The House with a View of the Field (Дом окнами в поле) in the November issue of Theatre (Театр).

He attended advanced courses at the Gorky Literary Institute from 1965 to 1967 and made the rounds of all the theaters of Moscow with a copy of the first version of Farewell in June (Прощание в июне) that initially bore the title The Fair (Ярмарка).

He was accepted into the Union in February 1966, the year he completed The Elder Son (Старший сын), first titled The Suburb (Предместье) and published Farewell in June.

[citation needed] The fate of the one-acts, Twenty Minutes with an Angel (Двадцать минут с ангелом) and Incident with a Typesetter (История с метранпажем), was somewhat different, and both Duck Hunting (Утиная охота) and Last Summer in Chulimsk (Прошлым летом в Чулимске) gained recognition only belatedly, after Vampilov's death.

Vampilov combined the two into Provincial Anecdotes(Провинциальные анекдоты), and they were first produced by the BDT, Big Dramatic Theater (Большой Драматический Театр), in Leningrad in March 1972, under the direction of A.G. Tovstonogov.

Reviews of productions repeatedly note that directors do not quite know how to handle Vampilov's plays, for they misunderstand the style and content of the works.

Reviews of his other plays, however, appeared in 1970 in leading journals: Theatre (Театр), Komsomol Truth (Комсомольская правда), and Soviet Culture (Советская культура).

Vampilov busied himself with a multitude of petty tasks that he had long postponed, but most importantly, he made arrangements for the first collection of his plays to be published.

Although he persistently spoke of his wish to return to prose, to write a novel, to start afresh, in the summer Vampilov began composing another dramatic piece, a "vaudeville", The Incomparable Nakonechnikov (Несравненный Наконечников).

From the vantage point of the lake, it appeared to Pakulov that Vampilov had nearly reached the shore, but his dead body was later found in quite deep water, which indicates that he had not made it to safety.

The explanation for Vampilov's attractiveness may lie in his sympathy for and sensitivity to people, in his artlessness and naturalness, and in the fact that he was rarely sullen or depressed among friends, but rather usually smiling.

In addition to noting Vampilov's huge charm, friends frequently remark on the absence of falsity in his behavior.

The author and fellow Siberian Dmitri Sergeev states that Vampilov had the wisdom of a mature person, yet the ingenuousness and inquisitiveness of a child.

Rasputin comments on Vampilov's expressing himself in a way that compelled others to listen to him and on his enriching conversations by taking a non-standard approach to the subject at hand.

[...] In Sasha that which they call inner tact was wonderfully developed and organized, and this concept includes taste, measure, harmony, the balance, gentleness, boldness and musicality of the human soul.

Dmitri Sergeev tells us that Vampilov was familiar with a wide range of drama, both Russian and international, and contemporary and historical; and likewise had a broad knowledge of poetry, with a particular fondness for the verses of Tyutchev.

Vladimir Zhemchuzhnikov claims that Vampilov's favorite authors were Gogol, Chekhov, Sukhovo-Kobylin, Naidenov and Bulgakov.