Vasily Aksyonov
Encyclopedia
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov (August 20, 1932 — July 6, 2009) was a Soviet and Russian
novelist. He is known in the West
as the author of The Burn (Ожог, Ozhog, from 1975) and Generations of Winter
(Московская сага, Moskovskaya Saga, from 1992), a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
in Kazan
, USSR
on August 20, 1932. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents "were prominent communists." In 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. They were both sent to Gulag
and then to exile, and "each served 18 years, but remarkably survived." "Later, Yevgenia came to prominence as the author of a famous memoir, Into the Whirlwind, documenting the brutality of Stalinist repression."
Aksyonov remained in Kazan with his nanny and grandmother until the NKVD
arrested him as a son of "enemies of the people
", and sent him to an orphanage without providing his family any information on his whereabouts. Aksyonov "remained [there] until rescued in 1938 by his uncle, with whose family he stayed until his mother was released into exile, having served 10 years of forced labour." "In 1947, Vasily joined her in exile in the notorious Magadan
, Kolyma
prison area, where he graduated from high school." Vasily's half-brother Alexei (from Ginzburg's first marriage to Dmitriy Fedorov) died from starvation in besieged Leningrad
in 1941.
His parents, seeing that doctors had the best chance to survive in the camps, decided that Aksyonov should go into the medical profession. "He therefore entered the university in Kazan and graduated in 1956 from the Leningrad Medical Institute" and worked as a doctor for the next 3 years. During his time as a medical student he came under surveillance by the KGB, who began to prepare a file against him. It is likely that he would have been arrested had the liberalisation that followed Stalin's death in 1953 not intervened.
(the ones 'with style')." As a result
In 1956, he was "discovered" and heralded by the Soviet writer Valentin Kataev
for his first publication, in the liberal magazine Youth. "His first novel, Colleagues (1961), was based on his experiences as a doctor." "His second, Ticket to the Stars (1961), depicting the life of Soviet youthful hipsters, made him an overnight celebrity."
In the 1960s Aksyonov was a frequent contributor to the popular "Yunost" ("Youth") magazine, and eventually became a staff writer. Aksyonov thus reportedly became "a leading figure in the so-called 'youth prose' movement and a darling of the Soviet liberal intelligentsia and their western supporters: his writings stood in marked contrast to the dreary, socialist-realist prose of the time." "Aksyonov's characters spoke in a natural way, using hip lingo, they went to bars and dance halls, had premarital sex, listened to jazz and rock'n'roll and hustled to score a pair of cool American shoes." "There was a feeling of freshness and freedom about his writings, similar to the one emanating from black-market recordings of American jazz and pop." "He soon became one of the informal leaders of the Shestidesyatniki -- which translates roughly as "the '60s generation" -- a group of young Soviets who resisted the Communist Party's cultural and ideological restrictions." "'It was amazing: We were being brought up robots, but we began to listen to jazz,' Aksyonov said in a 2007 documentary about him."
For all his hardship, Aksyonov,
However, Aksyonov's "open pro-Americanism and liberal values eventually led to problems with the KGB." "And his involvement in 1979 with an independent magazine, Metropol, led to an open confrontation with the authorities." His next two celebrated and dissident novels, The Burn and The Island of Crimea, could not be published in the USSR. "The former explored the plight of intellectuals under communism and the latter was an imagining of what life might have been like had the white army staved off the Bolsheviks in 1917."
"When The Burn was published in Italy
in 1980, Aksyonov accepted an invitation for him and his wife Maya to leave Russia for the US." "Soon afterwards, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship, regaining it only 10 years later during Gorbachev's perestroika."
"Aksyonov spent the next 24 years in Washington, D.C.
and Virginia
, where he taught Russian Literature
at George Mason University
." "He [also] taught literature at a number of [other] American universities, including USC
and Goucher College
in Maryland . . . [and] worked as a journalist for Radio Liberty."
"He continued to write novels, among which was the ambitious Generations of Winter (1994), a multi-generational saga of Soviet life that became a successful Russian TV mini-series." The so called "The Moscow Saga, [this 1994] epic trilogy . . . described the lives of three generations of a Soviet family between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's death in 1953." The TV mini-series consisted of 24 episodes and was broadcast on Russian television in 2004. "[In 1994], he also won the Russian Booker Prize, Russia's top literary award, for his historical novel Voltairian Men and Women, about a meeting between the famous philosopher Voltaire and Empress Catherine II."
"In 2004, he settled in Biarritz, France, and returned to the US less frequently, dividing his time between France and Moscow." His novel Moskva-kva-kva (2006) was published in the Moscow
-based magazine Oktyabr.
"Aksyonov was translated into numerous languages, and in Russia remained influential." He was reportedly "forever a hipster [and] was used to being in the avant garde, be it in fashion or literary innovation." He was described as "a colourful man, with his trademark moustache, elegant suits, expensive cars, and a love for grand cities, fine wine and good food."
On July 6, 2009, he died in Moscow at the age of 76 and is "survived by Maya and a son, Aleksei."
Russians
The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....
novelist. He is known in the West
Western world
The Western world, also known as the West and the Occident , is a term referring to the countries of Western Europe , the countries of the Americas, as well all countries of Northern and Central Europe, Australia and New Zealand...
as the author of The Burn (Ожог, Ozhog, from 1975) and Generations of Winter
Generations of Winter
Generations of Winter is a novel by Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov.Many critics have praised Generations of Winter as a new Doctor Zhivago large-scale Russian novel, which tells the story of a Russian family Gradov struggling to survive in the Stalinist era.As the Wall Street Journal has put it:...
(Московская сага, Moskovskaya Saga, from 1992), a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
Early life
Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia GinzburgYevgenia Ginzburg
Yevgenia Ginzburg was a Russian author who served an 18-year sentence in the Gulag. Her given name is often Latinized to Eugenia.-Family and early career:...
in Kazan
Kazan
Kazan is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Tatarstan, Russia. With a population of 1,143,546 , it is the eighth most populous city in Russia. Kazan lies at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers in European Russia. In April 2009, the Russian Patent Office granted Kazan the...
, USSR
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
on August 20, 1932. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents "were prominent communists." In 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. They were both sent to Gulag
Gulag
The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...
and then to exile, and "each served 18 years, but remarkably survived." "Later, Yevgenia came to prominence as the author of a famous memoir, Into the Whirlwind, documenting the brutality of Stalinist repression."
Aksyonov remained in Kazan with his nanny and grandmother until the NKVD
NKVD
The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs was the public and secret police organization of the Soviet Union that directly executed the rule of power of the Soviets, including political repression, during the era of Joseph Stalin....
arrested him as a son of "enemies of the people
Enemy of the people
The term enemy of the people is a fluid designation of political or class opponents of the group using the term. The term implies that the "enemies" in question are acting against society as a whole. It is similar to the notion of "enemy of the state". The term originated in Roman times as ,...
", and sent him to an orphanage without providing his family any information on his whereabouts. Aksyonov "remained [there] until rescued in 1938 by his uncle, with whose family he stayed until his mother was released into exile, having served 10 years of forced labour." "In 1947, Vasily joined her in exile in the notorious Magadan
Magadan
Magadan is a port town on the Sea of Okhotsk and gateway to the Kolyma region. It is the administrative center of Magadan Oblast , in the Russian Far East. Founded in 1929 on the site of an earlier settlement from the 1920s, it was granted the status of town in 1939...
, Kolyma
Kolyma
The Kolyma region is located in the far north-eastern area of Russia in what is commonly known as Siberia but is actually part of the Russian Far East. It is bounded by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean in the north and the Sea of Okhotsk to the south...
prison area, where he graduated from high school." Vasily's half-brother Alexei (from Ginzburg's first marriage to Dmitriy Fedorov) died from starvation in besieged Leningrad
Leningrad
Leningrad is the former name of Saint Petersburg, Russia.Leningrad may also refer to:- Places :* Leningrad Oblast, a federal subject of Russia, around Saint Petersburg* Leningrad, Tajikistan, capital of Muminobod district in Khatlon Province...
in 1941.
His parents, seeing that doctors had the best chance to survive in the camps, decided that Aksyonov should go into the medical profession. "He therefore entered the university in Kazan and graduated in 1956 from the Leningrad Medical Institute" and worked as a doctor for the next 3 years. During his time as a medical student he came under surveillance by the KGB, who began to prepare a file against him. It is likely that he would have been arrested had the liberalisation that followed Stalin's death in 1953 not intervened.
Career
Reportedly, "during the liberalisation that followed Stalin's death in 1953, Aksyonov came into contact with the first Soviet countercultural movement of zoot-suited hipsters called stilyagiStilyagi
Stilyagi was a derogatory appellation for the members of a youth subculture that existed from the late 1940s until the early 1960s in the Soviet Union. Stilyagi were primarily distinguished by their snappy or fashionable clothing, considered politically incorrect and contrary to the...
(the ones 'with style')." As a result
He fell in love with their slang, fashions, libertine lifestyles, dancing and especially their music. From this point on began his lifelong romance with jazz. Interest in his new milieu, western music, fashion and literature turned out to be life-changing for Aksyonov, who decided to dedicate himself to chronicling his times through literature. He remained a keen observer of youth, with its ever-changing styles, movements and trends. Like no other Soviet writer, he was attuned to the developments and changes in popular culture.
In 1956, he was "discovered" and heralded by the Soviet writer Valentin Kataev
Valentin Kataev
Valentin Petrovich Kataev was a Russian and Soviet novelist and playwright who managed to create penetrating works discussing post-revolutionary social conditions without running afoul of the demands of official Soviet style. Kataev is credited with suggesting the idea for the Twelve Chairs to his...
for his first publication, in the liberal magazine Youth. "His first novel, Colleagues (1961), was based on his experiences as a doctor." "His second, Ticket to the Stars (1961), depicting the life of Soviet youthful hipsters, made him an overnight celebrity."
In the 1960s Aksyonov was a frequent contributor to the popular "Yunost" ("Youth") magazine, and eventually became a staff writer. Aksyonov thus reportedly became "a leading figure in the so-called 'youth prose' movement and a darling of the Soviet liberal intelligentsia and their western supporters: his writings stood in marked contrast to the dreary, socialist-realist prose of the time." "Aksyonov's characters spoke in a natural way, using hip lingo, they went to bars and dance halls, had premarital sex, listened to jazz and rock'n'roll and hustled to score a pair of cool American shoes." "There was a feeling of freshness and freedom about his writings, similar to the one emanating from black-market recordings of American jazz and pop." "He soon became one of the informal leaders of the Shestidesyatniki -- which translates roughly as "the '60s generation" -- a group of young Soviets who resisted the Communist Party's cultural and ideological restrictions." "'It was amazing: We were being brought up robots, but we began to listen to jazz,' Aksyonov said in a 2007 documentary about him."
For all his hardship, Aksyonov,
as a prose stylist, was at the opposite pole from Mr. Solzhenitsyn, becoming a symbol of youthful promise and embracing fashion and jazz rather than dwelling on the miseries of the gulag. Ultimately, however, he shared Mr. Solzhenitsyn's fate of exile from the Soviet Union.
Solzhenitsyn is all about the imprisonment and trying to get out, and Aksyonov is the young person whose mother got out and he actually can live his life now, said Nina L. Khrushcheva, who is a great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and a friend of the Aksyonov family and who teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. It was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression.
However, Aksyonov's "open pro-Americanism and liberal values eventually led to problems with the KGB." "And his involvement in 1979 with an independent magazine, Metropol, led to an open confrontation with the authorities." His next two celebrated and dissident novels, The Burn and The Island of Crimea, could not be published in the USSR. "The former explored the plight of intellectuals under communism and the latter was an imagining of what life might have been like had the white army staved off the Bolsheviks in 1917."
"When The Burn was published in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
in 1980, Aksyonov accepted an invitation for him and his wife Maya to leave Russia for the US." "Soon afterwards, he was stripped of his Soviet citizenship, regaining it only 10 years later during Gorbachev's perestroika."
"Aksyonov spent the next 24 years in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
and Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, where he taught Russian Literature
Russian literature
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union...
at George Mason University
George Mason University
George Mason University is a public university based in unincorporated Fairfax County, Virginia, United States, south of and adjacent to the city of Fairfax. Additional campuses are located nearby in Arlington County, Prince William County, and Loudoun County...
." "He [also] taught literature at a number of [other] American universities, including USC
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
and Goucher College
Goucher College
Goucher College is a private, co-educational, liberal arts college located in the northern Baltimore suburb of Towson in unincorporated Baltimore County, Maryland, on a 287 acre campus. The school has approximately 1,475 undergraduate students studying in 31 majors and six interdisciplinary...
in Maryland . . . [and] worked as a journalist for Radio Liberty."
"He continued to write novels, among which was the ambitious Generations of Winter (1994), a multi-generational saga of Soviet life that became a successful Russian TV mini-series." The so called "The Moscow Saga, [this 1994] epic trilogy . . . described the lives of three generations of a Soviet family between the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and Stalin's death in 1953." The TV mini-series consisted of 24 episodes and was broadcast on Russian television in 2004. "[In 1994], he also won the Russian Booker Prize, Russia's top literary award, for his historical novel Voltairian Men and Women, about a meeting between the famous philosopher Voltaire and Empress Catherine II."
"In 2004, he settled in Biarritz, France, and returned to the US less frequently, dividing his time between France and Moscow." His novel Moskva-kva-kva (2006) was published in the Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
-based magazine Oktyabr.
"Aksyonov was translated into numerous languages, and in Russia remained influential." He was reportedly "forever a hipster [and] was used to being in the avant garde, be it in fashion or literary innovation." He was described as "a colourful man, with his trademark moustache, elegant suits, expensive cars, and a love for grand cities, fine wine and good food."
On July 6, 2009, he died in Moscow at the age of 76 and is "survived by Maya and a son, Aleksei."
Political views
Vasily Aksyonov was a convinced anti-totalitarian. On the presentation of one of his last novels, he stated: "If in this country one starts erecting Stalin statues again, I have to reject my native land. Nothing else remains."Works
His other novels are- Colleagues ("Коллеги" - Kollegi, 1960)
- Ticket to the Stars ("Звёздный билет" - Zvyozdny bilet, 1961)
- Oranges from Morocco ("Апельсины из Марокко" - Apel'siny iz Marokko, 1963)
- It's Time, My Friend, It's Time ("Пора, мой друг, пора" - Pora, moy drug, pora, 1964)
- It's a Pity You Weren't with Us ("Жаль, что вас не было с нами" - Zhal', chto vas ne bylo s nami, 1965)
- Overstocked Packaging Barrels ("Затоваренная бочкотара" - Zatovarennaya bochkotara, 1968)
- In Search of a Genre ("В поисках жанра" - V poiskakh zhanra, 1972)
- Translation of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime into Russian (1976)
- The Island of Crimea ("Остров Крым" - "Ostrov Krym", 1979)
- Say Cheese ("Скажи изюм" - Skazhi izyum, 1983)
- In Search of Melancholy Baby ("В поисках грустного бэби" - V poiskakh grustnogo bebi, 1987)
- Yolk of the Egg (written in English, 1989)
- Generations of WinterGenerations of WinterGenerations of Winter is a novel by Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov.Many critics have praised Generations of Winter as a new Doctor Zhivago large-scale Russian novel, which tells the story of a Russian family Gradov struggling to survive in the Stalinist era.As the Wall Street Journal has put it:...
(English ed. of "Московская сага", 1994). Random House. ISBN 0-394-56961-X. - The New Sweet Style ("Новый сладостный стиль" - Novy sladostny stil, 1998)
- Voltairian Men and Women ("Вольтерьянцы и вольтерьянки" - Volteryantsy i volteryanki, 2004 - won the Russian Booker PrizeRussian Booker PrizeThe Russian Booker Prize is a Russian literary award modeled after the Booker Prize and inaugurated in 1992 by English Chief Executive Sir Michael Caine...
). - Moscow ow ow ("Москва Ква-Ква" - Moskva Kva-Kva, 2006)
- Rare Earths ("Редкие земли" - Redkie zemli, 2007)