Word: vasili
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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...
...DIED. Vasili Chuikov, 82, Russian military commander and hero of the Soviets' stalwart defense of Stalingrad during World War II. Chuikov accepted the German surrender of Berlin and headed the Soviet occupation forces in East Germany from...
...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...