Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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. In addition, Aksyonov and his wife Maya extend nonstop hospitality in their Washington, D.C., apartment to Soviet exiles passing through the capital...
...word novel, The Burn, which Random House will publish later this year. A denser, darker work than The Island, The Burn reflects the author's searing experience as the child of victims of Stalin's great purges. It also powerfully evokes another subject proscribed in Soviet fiction since Stalin's day: sex. It is a fact of life made frightening and moving by Aksyonov...
Novelist Yuz Aleshkovsky, 54, views all forbidden topics as the domain of farce. The comic artist had to support himself in the Soviet Union writing children's books. Now he has returned to adult fiction with gusto. His raunchiest work, Nikolai Nikolayevich, is a Russian Portnoy's Complaint. In Aleshkovsky's book, as in Philip Roth's novel, the hero spends most of his time masturbating. The Russian, however, finds an ingenious way to turn his obsession into a cushy government job when a Soviet laboratory purchases his prodigious production of spermatozoa for the greater glory...
...virtual unknown in his homeland. His first work since he emigrated in 1978 is The Invisible Book, published by Ardis Press in Ann Arbor, Mich., a small publishing house that specializes in Russian literature. Currently one of the most visible writers in exile, Dovlatov is a regular contributor of fiction to The New Yorker. Last fall a collection of short pieces, The Compromise, was published by Knopf. The tales are conspicuously devoid of the anger, overt and covert, that characterizes many émigrés' writing about their native country; Dovlatov's stories gently ridicule the obtuseness...
...handle of a clothesbrush. Now available in Russian in the West, the book is a masterpiece of modern realism. Set in the author's native Odessa, The Courtyard tells the intermingled life stories of ten families that occupy a single tenement house. No other work of Russian fiction has portrayed the everyday life of ordinary Soviet citizens with such compassion and in such mesmerizing detail. Lvov's villain, the local party boss, and tyrant of the tenement, is as lethal to the human spirit as any hound of hell conjured up by Dostoyevsky...