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Yury Fyodorovich Karyakin (22 July 1930 — 18 November 2011)
was a Russian literary critic, writer, publicist and public figure. He is best for his profound works on a great Russian writer Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky with "Reading Dostoyevsky Again" and "Raskolnikov`s Self-Deception" often cited as the most famous of his books. Yury was born in Perm, a provincial Ural town, to a family of a former Red Army commander and a district committee secretary later excluded from the party. As Yury`s father died of tuberculosis when he was 4 years, Karyakin was brought up by his step-father Fyodor Ivanovich Karyakin whose last name he took. In 1943 his family moved to Moscow, where he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the Moscow State University. In 1960 Karyakin was invited to Prague to join Rumyantsev in the "Problems of Peace and Socialism", a theoretical and ideological journal of communist and workers parties around the world. In 5 years following the end of the Khrushchev, Thaw Karyakin had to return to Moscow becoming a special correspondent of the "Pravda", a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union, where he would spend 2 years. During this period Yury met Bakhtin (this acquaintance would determine the direction of his literary research in future) and became friends with Solzhenitsyn. Having quitted "Pravda", Karyakin took the position of senior researcher of the Institute for International Labor Movement of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1968 he was expelled from The Communist Party of the Soviet Union because of his anti-Stalinist speech dedicated to Andrey Platonov. In spite of falling into disgrace, he still enjoyed relative freedom in his scientific work at the institute, which was focused exclusively on his research on Dostoyevsky until the beginning of 1980s, when he showed a keen interest in the problems of nuclear and ecological threats posed to the humanity. The commencement of Perestroika is associated with the end of Karyakin`s "office life" giving place to the active participation in the sociopolitical struggle. In the early 1990s Yury was a prominent public figure frequently appearing on television and publishing numerous articles in the printed media. Many still remember his aphoristic comment on the results of 1993 parliamentary elections saying "Russia, you went out of your mind!" Stating from 1993 Karyakin lived in the "writers` village" of Peredelkino concentrating primarily on his literary work. During the last years of his life bedridden at home, Karyakin was suffering from a serious illness.