Word: aksyonov
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...eminent among the new émigrés is Vasili Aksyonov, 51, who departed from the Soviet Union in 1980 with two major novels in manuscript and a head full of ideas for new work. Since settling in the U.S. he has finished two more novels, both of which are scheduled for American publication. "I've got no time for nostalgia," says Aksyonov in fluent English. He teaches a seminar in Russian literature at Goucher College near Baltimore, and once a week his reviews of new U.S. fiction are broadcast to the Soviet Union over the Voice of America...
...enough writers here to form a dissident branch of the Soviet Writers' Union," Aksyonov ironically observes. A member of the official union for 18 years and the U.S.S.R.'s most popular living novelist, Aksyonov was pressured to leave the country when he edited an anthology of unorthodox Russian writing that the union deemed subversive. The collection, entitled Metropol, which includes an excerpt of a comic play by Aksyonov, was published in the U.S. by W.W.Norton...
...heroes in Aksyonov's books were teen-age runaways who craved rokmuzyka, wore Keds and dzhinsy and talked a nonstop street slang larded with Americanisms, just like real-life Russians. Predictably, Aksyonov's very popularity with the young made him suspect to the Soviet literary Establishment. Yet he remained a member of the Union of Soviet Writers for 18 years...
...past two years, however, the authorities have systematically expunged Aksyonov's name from the annals of contemporary Russian letters. The reasons were not hard to find. In addition to his writing, he had been attempting to challenge Soviet censorship. His anthology of unorthodox Russian writing, Metropol, was denounced in the Soviet press as salacious and subversive. The Soviet secret police, the KGB, began to hound him in an effort to drive him into exile. In 1980, Aksyonov and his wife Maya succumbed to pressure and left the Soviet Union. His citizenship was then taken away by the Supreme Soviet...
...city's parks and around Capitol Hill. Extraordinarily productive, he has confounded every cliché about the predicament of the writer in exile. Although cut off from his natural readers, as well as from the subject matter of his books and the living language of his art, Aksyonov explains in fluent English: "I brought enough baggage with me in my head to last for the rest of my life." Since his emigration, he has written two novels, a film script and several short stories, all in Russian and set in the Soviet Union...