Reportedly, Yuri Kazakov was born to a worker's family in Moscow and grew up in the old Arbat area, which has today been turned into a tourist attraction but in the mid-1900s was the focal point of Russian culture.

"[2] "By this time he had already written and published several stories, which were appreciated by such established writers as Konstantin Paustovsky, Viktor Shklovsky, and Ilya Ehrenburg.

"[2] However, the authorities adopted a critical attitude to the new writer and the central literary journals stopped publishing him in 1959.

"[2] The writer's formative years passed under the influence of two major factors: Russian classical literature (in addition to Bunin, Kazakov's early prose bore the imprint of the works of Chekhov and Turgenev) and the Thaw.

"[2] Kazakov slowly but surely overcame the influence of the classics and developed his own style and voice in his stories as to the Thaw, it petered out gradually, but Kazakov did not take the road of the dissidents or many of the other "men of the sixties", who vacillated between collaboration with the Soviet regime and fawning on the West.

"[2] Kazakov lived in Moscow but spent a good deal of time traveling along the shores of the White Sea, among the provincial towns along the Oka, and in Central Russian Upland and the wooded areas around them.

[3] George Gibian has said that "Kazakov is worthy of note not because of any 'disaffection' or 'dissidence,' but because what he says about his haunting characters set against an impressively captured nature is penetrating, true and beautiful."