Vladimir Samarin was born Vladimir Dmitrievich Sokolov March 2, 1913 in the central Russian city of Orel. In 1936, despite some troubles encountered due to his family's bourgeois background, he completed the local Institute and commenced a career teaching Russian literature in Voronezh.
Under German occupation in 1942-1944 Samarin wrote for the newspapers Rech (based in Orel) and Volia naroda . Upon arriving at a camp for displaced persons (DPs) in post-war Germany he continued his journalistic calling in new émigré publications. In addition to contributing anti-communist commentaries and short-stories to various journals, he was editor of Put' (1946-1949) and Posev (1949-1951) and a prominent member of the anti-communist Natsional'no-trudovoi soiuz (NTS). In 1951, Samarin emigrated to the United States, where he worked for a while as a copy-editor for the Chekhov Publishing House in New York. He continued to write for émigré journals such as Grani and Vozrozhdenie, and for the newspapers Novoe russkoe slovo and La pensée russe . In 1964, Samarin published his first collection of stories, Peschanaia otmel', which was followed by TSvet vremeni (1969), Teni na stene (1972) and Teplyi mramor (1976). In 1972, Samarin collected his travel sketches into the book Dalekaia zvezda . That same year, he published in English an impassioned account of the Russian Orthodox Church under Soviet rule, Triumphant Cain. An Outline of the Calvary of the Russian Church .
Samarin was a lecturer of Russian language at Yale University from 1959. In 1976, the Soviet propaganda organ "Sowjetisches Heimland" called attention to his wartime activities as a collaborationist journalist. He subsequently resigned his position at Yale and was deported to Canada, where he died on January 19, 1992. Samarin is buried at Novo-Diveevo cemetary in Spring Valley, New York.
From the guide to the Vladimir Samarin correspondence and other papers, 1948-1976, (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
