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Book Home  Famous Authors Vasili Aksenov
Vasili Aksenov
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He is known in the West as the author of The Burn and Generations of Winter, a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg in Kazan, USSR on August 20, 1932. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents "were prominent communists.", In 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. They were both sent to Gulag and then to exile, and "each served 18 years, but remarkably survived." "Later, Yevgenia came to prominence as the author of a famous memoir, Into the Whirlwind, documenting the brutality of Stalinist repression."
Aksyonov remained in Kazan with his nanny and grandmother until the NKVD arrested him as a son of "enemies of the people", and sent him to an orphanage without providing his family any information on his whereabouts. Aksyonov "remained [there] until rescued in 1938 by his uncle, with whose family he stayed until his mother was released into exile, having served 10 years of forced labour." "In 1947, Vasily joined her in exile in the notorious Magadan, Kolyma prison area, where he graduated from high school." Vasily's half-brother Alexei (from Ginzburg's first marriage to Dmitriy Fedorov) died from starvation in besieged Leningrad in 1941.
His parents, seeing that doctors had the best chance to surivive in the camps, decided that Aksyonov should go into the medical profession. "He therefore entered the university in Kazan and graduated in 1956 from the Leningrad Medical Institute" and worked as a doctor for the next 3 years.
His other novels are
- Colleagues ("Коллеги" - Kollegi, 1960)
- Ticket to the Stars ("Звёздный билет" - Zvyozdny bilet, 1961)
- Oranges from Morocco ("Апельсины из Марокко" - Apel'siny iz Marokko, 1963)
- It's Time, My Friend, It's Time ("Пора, мой друг, пора" - Pora, moy drug, pora, 1964)
- It's a Pity You Weren't with Us ("Жаль, что вас не было с нами" - Zhal', chto vas ne bylo s nami, 1965)
- Overstocked Packaging Barrels ("Затоваренная бочкотара" - Zatovarennaya bochkotara, 1968)
- In Search of a Genre ("В поисках жанра" - V poiskakh zhanra, 1972)
- Translation of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime into Russian (1976)
- The Island of Crimea ("Остров Крым" - "Ostrov Krym", 1979)
- Say Cheese ("Скажи изюм" - Skazhi izyum, 1983)
- In Search of Melancholy Baby ("В поисках грустного бэби" - V poiskakh grustnogo bebi, 1987)
- Yolk of the Egg (written in English, 1989)
- Generations of Winter (English ed. of "Московская сага", 1994). Random House.
- The New Sweet Style ("Новый сладостный стиль" - Novy sladostny stil', 1998)
- Voltairian Men and Women ("Вольтерьянцы и вольтерьянки" - Volteryantsy i volteryanki, 2004 - won the Russian Booker Prize).
- Moscow ow ow ("Москва Ква-Ква" - Moskva Kva-Kva, 2006)
- Rare Earths ("Редкие земли" - Redkie zemli, 2007)
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