Word: aksyonov
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Avid Russian readers used to strip Soviet bookshops of a new novel by Vasili Aksyonov as if they were stocking up on candles before a storm. A first printing of 100,000 copies would vanish from the stores within 48 hours, and any magazine containing an Aksyonov short story, like his celebrated Halfway to the Moon, could count on the immediate sellout of a 2 million-copy press run. No other prose writer of the post-Stalin generation commanded such an impassioned following; no other offered a more radical departure from the standard Socialist Realist fare. His nonconformity came naturally...
...occasion of the last Moscow International Book Fair had been a literary highlight. It was 1979, and present at the plush Aragvi Restaurant in the Soviet capital was a pleiad of Russian writers and intellectuals, including Andrei Sakharov, the famed nuclear physicist, Dissident Author Anatoli Marchenko, Novelists Vasili Aksyonov and Vladimir Voinovich, and Critics Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova. But when the U.S. publishers got ready to give another such gala at the Moscow book fair this month, they knew the party would have to be smaller...
Since the last outing, the KGB has seized Sakharov and dispatched him to the city of Gorky, where he has been held incommunicado for the past 20 months. Marchenko has just been sentenced to ten years of hard labor and five of exile for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Aksyonov, Voinovich, Kopelev, Orlova and several others have been forced to live abroad. Even the erstwhile hosts have been made unwelcome. Four prominent American publishers were refused visas to the Soviet Union, and Random House Chairman Robert L. Bernstein was the target of an anti-Semitic attack in Literaturnaya Gazeta...
...Kolyma, mother and son found a means of communicating with each other by reciting poetry during their first night together. Those lines, she recalls, were "a bulwark against the inhumanity of the real world ... a form of resistance." Vasya (who grew up to be the brilliant Russian novelist Vasili Aksyonov) told her "Now I understand what a mother is ... you can recite your favorite verses to her and if you stop she will go on from the line where you left...
...Steel Bird, which was published last year in the U.S., marks Aksyonov's break with realism in favor of the grotesque. This novella features a ghastly humanoid with a metal carapace who blackmails the superintendent of an apartment house into letting him live in the elevator. Acting with Stalinist guile, the steel bird takes over the entire building and its tenants. The structure soon collapses; the creature is left to roost triumphantly atop the elevator shaft, surveying the debris...