This book has come about as the result of several years' work on Trifonov's texts which began as I was completing my doctoral thesis in 1984–5. The thesis concentrated on the work of the ‘village writers’ Valentin Rasputin and Vasilii Belov, but as work on it drew to an end in the summer of 1984 I became equally interested in the ‘urban prose’ of Iurii Trifonov. I was struck by the fact that most critics wrote only about the writer's depiction of urban life and mores, whereas I became increasingly interested in the historical and temporal dimensions of his world. This book attempts to fill what I perceive to be a large gap in Trifonov criticism, although worthy full-length studies have appeared in the last few years both in the USSR and the West.

Consequently, much preliminary work, in particular in compiling the bibliography, was carried out in the Lenin State Library and the Academy of Sciences' Library, both in Moscow, and in the Academy of Sciences' Library in Leningrad, in the Spring of 1982 and the whole of the academic year 1984–5. Further work was done in the library of Khar'kov State University in the Ukraine in August 1990 and March 1991.