Yury Valentinovich Trifonov (Russian: Юрий Валентинович Трифонов; 28 August 1925 – 28 March 1981) was a leading representative of the so-called Soviet "Urban Prose".

[1][2] Trifonov was born in the luxurious apartments on the Arbat Street and, with a two-year interval in Tashkent, spent his whole life in Moscow.

An Old Bolshevik and Red Army veteran who commanded Cossacks in the Don during the civil war and later served as a Soviet official, he was arrested on 21/22 June 1937[3] and shot on 15 March 1938.

[6] During their mother's imprisonment, Trifonov and his sister were raised by their maternal grandmother, Tatyana Aleksandrovna Lurie (née Slovatinskaya, 1879–1957), who had been a professional revolutionary and took part in the Russian Civil War.

Trifonov's maternal grandfather, Abram Pavlovich Lurie (1875–1924), had been a member of an underground Menshevik group, and a cousin of Aaron Soltz.

[10] In 1964–1965, Trifonov published the documentary novel The Campfire Glow, in which he described the revolutionary activities of his father and his uncle Evgeny (the excerpts of whose diaries are included in the narrative) before the revolution and during the civil war.

[10] The cycle Muscovite novellas, started in the late 1960s, marked the beginning of the "Urban Prose", portraying the everyday lives of city dwellers.

[17] The collection of short stories House Upside Down and the novel Time and Place were published after Trifonov's death in 1981.

[22] After Trifonov's death, Olga Miroshnichenko-Trifonova published her late husband's diaries and notebooks, going back to the writer's schooldays and ending in 1980.