Word: vasili
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Screwtape Letters. Screwtape would have enjoyed comparing notes with officials from the Soviet Union's State Council on Religious Affairs. At least so it would seem from an extraordinary Soviet study now circulating in the West. The secret report, reputedly written in 1975 by Council Deputy Chairman Vasili Furov, assessed the condition of the still enormous Russian Orthodox Church for the Communist Party Central Committee. In striking contrast to provisions in the Soviet constitution guaranteeing "that the church in the U.S.S.R. shall be separated from the state," the report depicts a church bound hand and foot by the state...
...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...
...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...
...short story writers to emerge since Stalin's death, Vasili Aksyonov, 47, continues to display the greatest virtuosity. Although he has written enormously popular stories in a realist vein, Aksyonov has gone on to explore a variety of modes and permutations of language, entering the 1980s as the Soviet Union's only truly modern prose writer. His evolution is instructive. Aksyonov's first fiction dealt with a previously unheard-of theme: the real life of Soviet teenagers...