Writers

Born: 1958

Quick Study: Marina Adamovich is editor-in-chief of Novyi Zhurnal, a Russian-language literary journal published in the U.S.

The Adamovich File: Marina Adamovich, a journalist by education, has served as editor-in-chief of the quarterly Novyi Zhurnal (The New Review), a storied émigré journal based in New York, since 2005. The New Review publishes contemporary and classic poetry and a broad selection of prose, including fiction and nonfiction pieces about history, language, and literature. Adamovich has written essays and critical pieces for other “thick” Russian journals, including Kontinent, Novyi mir, and Znamia.

Psssst………: Adamovich said in an interview that New Review’s goal was established in its first issue, in 1942, as, “Russia. Freedom. Emigration,” adding that, “Nothing has changed” but noting a bit later that, in a globalized world, emigration and immigration have shifted to migration. New Review was forbidden in the Soviet Union.

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Born: 1929

Quick Study: Yuz Aleshkovsky is a popular writer of poetry, prose, and screenplays who is especially noted for his colorful nonconformist works and pioneering uses of expletives in Russian literature.

The Aleshkovsky File: Yuz Aleshkovsky began his literary career in the early 1950s by writing screenplays and children’s stories, later moving on to write works that could only be published unofficially during the Soviet era, as samizdat. He emigrated in the late 1970s. Aleshkovsky’s work is marked by satire, prison camp themes, and vernacular language, including creative uses of words unable to pass prim Soviet censors. Several of his novels, including Kangaroo and The Hand, have been translated into English, and his most recent book, A Little Prison Novel, won the Russian Prize in April 2012.

Psssst………: Aleshkovsky’s (very unofficial!) song “Товарищ Сталин, вы большой ученый” (“Comrade Stalin, You Are a Great Scholar”), from a “simple Soviet prisoner,” is a classic. The song came into being in prison camp: the twenty-year-old Aleshkovsky was sentenced to “sit” after he and fellow sailors, drunk, stole a car so they wouldn’t be late for a train. Aleshkovsky served four years in Birobidzhan, in the Jewish Autonomous Republic. Aleshkovsky was freed when Stalin died in 1953.

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Born: 1970

Maxim Amelin is a poet, essayist, translator, researcher of poetry, and publisher. Born in 1970 in the city of Kursk in Western Russia, he studied at the Gorky Literary Institute in Saint Petersburg, and for fourteen years was the director of Saint Petersburg’s Symposium Publishing House. He currently lives in Moscow, where he is the Editor-in-Chief for OGI Publishing House.

Amelin is the author of three books of poetry, Cold Odes (1996), Dubia (1999), The Gorgon’s Steed (2003), and the collection of poetry, articles and essays The Curved Speech (2011). His poems have been translated into Armenian, Chinese, Croatian, English, French, Hungarian, Georgian, German, Italian, Latvian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Vietnamese, and other languages. He is also the author of numerous articles and essays about poets and poetry and has compiled a number of poetry anthologies, including An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Poetry (Beijing: National Literature, 2006).

Amelin is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Anti-Booker (1998), the prestigious Moscow Count Prize (2004, 2012), the Bunin Prize (2012) and, most recently, the Solzhenitsyn Prize (2013).  He is a member of the Russian PEN Center and the Guild of Literary Translators. In the U.S., Amelin’s poetry is included in Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (Talisman House Publishers, 2000).

Born: 1962

Quick Study: Alexander Arkhangelsky is a cultural commentator and observer, novelist, and journalist who hosts an issues-based TV talk show, Meanwhile.

The Arkhangelsky File: Alexander Arkhangelsky’s diverse list of writing credits includes 1962, a book about his birth year that blends history and memoir; The Price of Isolation, a novel about contemporary Russia; works about Alexander Pushkin; and literary reviews. Arkhangelsky’s 2012 novel, The Museum of the Revolution, involves love, war, politics, and other forms of conflict that swirl around a museum; the book was first released in electronic form complete with an "outtake" chapter. Since 2002, Arkhangelsky has hosted Meanwhile, a TV talk show on the Culture channel that looks at cultural, political, and historical issues. Arkhangelsky’s long resume also includes teaching in the Media Communications department of the Higher School of Economics and editing and writing for the newspaper Izvestiia.

Psssst………: Arkhangelsky has been known to write under the pseudonyms Arkhip Angelevich and Angelina Arkhipova. He served on the Russian Booker jury for the 1996 award.

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Born: 1969

Quick Study: Andrei Astvatsaturov writes autobiographical prose that explores his past and his city, Leningrad-St. Petersburg, with a humor that his publisher compares with Woody Allen’s.

The Astvatsaturov File: In his day job, Astvatsaturov is an academic specializing in Henry Miller and T.S. Eliot: he teaches in the history of foreign literature department at Saint Petersburg State University and heads up the literature program at Smolny College, an institution founded by SPSU and Bard College. Astvatsaturov’s debut book, People in the Nude, was shortlisted for the 2010 National Bestseller and NOS awards, and his second book, Skunkamera, was shortlisted for NOS, where it won the reader’s choice prize.

Psssst….........: Astvatsaturov was a nominee for GQ writer of the year for 2010. He has also hosted a show, “Writer’s House,” on a St. Petersburg TV station.

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Born: 1951

Quick Study: Vsevolod Bagno is a distinguished literary scholar and translator of Spanish literature, director of the Institute of Russian Literature (aka the Pushkin House, a constituent institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences specializing in literature), editor-in-chief of the journal Russkaya literatura, and member of several Russian Federation cultural committees and councils.

The Bagno File: Bagno studied Spanish language and literature at Leningrad State University and wrote his two dissertations at the Pushkin House, eventually becoming that eminent institution’s director. He went on to produce an extensive body of scholarship on Russian literature, Spanish literature, and the cultural and literary connections between the two. He is also a professor at Saint Petersburg State University and a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has translated poetry, prose, and drama from Spanish, Catalan, English, and French (including Francisco de Quevedo, José Ortega y Gasset, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Germain Nouveau, Ramon Llull, and John Keats); edited editions of collected works of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Julio Cortázar in Russian translation; and since 2001 has periodically released collections of punning, paradoxical aphorisms entitled Pod absurdinku (a play on words combining the meanings of “muted,” “on the sly,” and “absurd”). 

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Born: 1976

Quick Study: Polina Barskova began publishing her poetry as a nine-year-old: she has gone on to publish her first collection in 1991, become a finalist for the 2000 Debut Prize, and have poems translated into English for literary journals, anthologies, and two solo volumes.

The Barskova File: Polina Barskova’s poetry has won her wide recognition as one of the best poets of her generation: she has been shortlisted for Russian prizes including the Debut and Andrei Bely, and has published numerous collections. Two volumes of her poetry have been translated into English, including The Zoo in Winter: Selected Poems, in 2011, which contains 79 poems. As a scholar, Barskova, a professor of Russian literature at Hampshire College, explores the mythologies and slum texts of early Soviet-period writers from her native city, Leningrad-St. Petersburg.

Psssst………: In spring 2012, Barskova taught a “Mysteries of Petersburg” course at Hampshire College; the description includes this line: “Building on the works of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, this course uses the lower depths of Petersburg as a symptomatic locus that may serve as a prism through which this city was read and written.” She also taught a course called “Writing the City at War (London, Leningrad, Warsaw, Berlin).”

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Born: 1961

Quick Study: Pavel Basinsky is a journalist, literary critic and scholar, and fiction writer who won wide notice with a book about Leo Tolstoy.

The Basinsky File: Journalist, critic, and fiction writer Pavel Basinsky hit the bestseller list and won the 2010 Big Book Award with Leo Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise, a nonfiction account of Tolstoy’s life that begins with the end by investigating the writer’s departure from his home. Flight from Paradise was also named Book of the Year at the Moscow Book Fair in 2010, the hundredth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death. Basinsky first made the Big Book shortlist in 2008 with his debut novel, A Russian Novel, Or the Life and Adventures of John Polovinkin, a novelistic study in genres. He has been on the judges’ panel for the Debut, Solzhenitsyn and Yasnaya Polyana prizes, and has been writing cultural and literary criticism for a half-dozen newspapers and journals since 1981. Along with being a Tolstoy expert, he has also written three books on Maxim Gorky and compiled anthologies of individual writers such as Gorky, Mandelstam, Leonid Andreyev, and Mikhail Kuzmin, as well as anthologies of poetry and prose. 

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Born: 1961

Quick Study: Ilya Boyashov writes short novels, often blending elements of history, fantasy, and satire to craft parables.

The Boyashov File: Ilya Boyashov, a history instructor and novelist who believes history is literature rather than a science, published his first book of fiction—a short story collection called Play Your Own Melody—in 1989. Boyashov now tends to write concise novels that use allegory, fantasy, and humor to address cultural and historical topics. Boyashov has received considerable critical acclaim: he won the 2007 National Bestseller award for The Way of Muri, a short novel about an allegorical Bosnian tomcat wandering Europe after losing his people during the war. Not long thereafter, his The Tank Driver, or “The White Tiger,” which draws on World War 2 history as it tells the story of a Soviet tank driver searching for a ghost-like German White Tiger tank, was shortlisted for the National Bestseller and Big Book awards. The book was adapted for film by Karen Shakhnazarov, as The White Tiger, and selected as Russia’s foreign language film entry for the 2013 Academy Awards.

Psssst………: Boyashov said in an interview that he began putting stories to paper when he was a first grader, progressing, as he grew, from pen and ink to ballpoint pens, then a typewriter in his teens; he says he now likes using a notebook computer because it’s portable and saves time in making revisions… Boyashov says he was denied membership in the Communist Party for having a poor attitude.

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Born: 1954

Quick Study: Buida writes short stories, novellas, and novels that often contain historical, grotesque, and metaphysical elements.

The Buida File: Yury Buida was first published as a fiction writer in the early 1990s after a career in journalism in his native Kaliningrad region. His novel Blue Blood, which uses literary allusions and quirky Soviet-era situations to transform Soviet actress Valentina Karavaeva into a fictional heroine, was a 2011 Big Book award finalist, winning third prize among readers. Buida’s work has also been shortlisted for the Russian Booker Prize, and he won the 1999 Apollon Grigoriev Award for his collection The Prussian Bride.

Psssst………: Two of Buida’s novels—Ermo and The Third Heart—play on themes from Vladimir Nabokov’s fiction.

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