Alexander Valentinovich Vampilov (Russian: Александр Валентинович Вампилов; 19 August 1937 – 17 August 1972) was a Soviet playwright. His play The Elder Son was first performed in 1969, and became a national success two years later. Many of his plays have been filmed or televised in Russia. His four full-length plays were translated into English and Duck Hunting was performed in London and Washington DC (Arena Stage).

Vampilov was the fourth child in the family of schoolteachers. His father, Valentin Nikitich, was of Buryat ancestry, and his mother, Anastasia Prokopievna was Russian, the daughter of a Russian Orthodox Church priest. His father was arrested for alleged nationalist activity.

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". After studying literature and history at the Department of Philology at Irkutsk State University, graduating in 1960, he turned to theatre. He was executive secretary of an Irkutsk newspaper from 1962 to 1964, and later formed an acquaintance with popular dramatist Aleksei Arbuzov.

The first production of Farewell in June in Moscow in 1966 was unsuccessful, but by the early 1970s he was becoming very well known, and his humanity and insight has been compared with that of Chekhov. [1].

He married in the early 1970s, and drowned in 1972, while fishing on Lake Baikal. Last Summer in Tchulimsk was his final play.

Aleksandr Valentinovich Vampilov was born in Cheremkhovo in the Irkutsk Oblast of eastern Siberia on 19 August 1937. His father, Valentin Nikitich Vampilov, born in 1898, was a Buryat from the nearby village of Alar. At his father's death, Valentin, who was seventeen, undertook the running of the family's cattle farm. He managed at the same time to graduate from the gymnasium and go on to study in the historical-philological department of Irkutsk State University. 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. In the summer of Vampilov's birth he was transferred to Alar as chief teacher.

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. In 1937 he was arrested on ridiculous but standard charges for the time. Following the arrest, Aleksandra Afrikanovna, settled in Kutulik with her youngest daughter, Anastasia, Aleksandr Vampilov's mother. Aleksandra Afrikanovna lived to ninety two, dying only three years before her famous grandson, whom she had lovingly cared for when he was a child. Born in 1906, Anastasia studied at the gymnasium and then completed a teacher training course.

Aleksandr Vampilov never knew his father, because on 17 January 1938, Valentin was arrested on fabricated charges. He was shot in Irkutsk in March of the same year (and rehabilitated in 1957). Aleksandr was named in honor of Aleksandr Pushkin since the year of his birth was the hundredth anniversary of the poet's death. For his son he bought the new edition of the collected works of Pushkin that was published that year. There is a certain irony in the final choice of first name, in that Vampilov, like his namesake, died prematurely, at almost exactly the same age.