Olga Slavnikova

Born: 1919

Quick Study: Daniil Granin is a prose writer known for realistic, often documentary, fiction that draws on scientific and ethical issues in industry during the 1940s and 1950s, as well as experiences during World War 2.

The Granin File: Though Daniil Granin published stories as a teenager, he didn’t begin consistently publishing until completing college, serving in World War 2 as a volunteer, and becoming an engineer. Around 1950 he published “The Second Variant” and “Engineer Korsakov’s Victory” (a.k.a. “Dispute Over the Ocean”), about rivalries between the USSR and the US. Granin become a full-time writer after the success of Those Who Seek, a Thaw Era novel about electrical engineers. Despite the thaw, Granin’s 1956 story “A Personal Opinion” drew criticism, including from Molotov, who Granin said told him, at the former Stalin dacha, the story was “against the party,” though he praised Those Who Seek. Granin’s other Soviet-era books include the 1987 documentary novel The Bison, based on the true story of a Soviet geneticist who worked in Germany for 20 years during the Stalin era and faced consequences upon returning home, and nonfiction about the blockade of Leningrad co-written with Ales Adamovich. Granin’s post-Soviet writings include Evenings with Peter the Great, one of many works adapted for cinema or TV, and My Lieutenant, a novel about World War 2 that won the 2012 Big Book Award.

Psssst………: Fought in the Soviet tank troops during World War 2, serving as a volunteer… An asteroid discovered in 1979 was named after Granin: 3120 Dangrania… Granin was a people’s deputy of the USSR during the perestroika era… Grigorii Romanov, a local and national Communist Party official who survived the blockade of Leningrad, criticized Granin in 2004 for Leningrad Under Siege, which Granin wrote with Ales Adamovich; Romanov called the book incorrect and subjective, and said Granin wanted to surrender the city… It’s likely Romanov had other “issues” with Granin, whose “Our Dear Roman Avdeevich,” a satirical portrait of Romanov first published in 1990, probably didn’t endear him much to the former Party boss, either… Granin says he wrote My Lieutenant after finding diary entries from his time at the front and early post-war years; he wrote the book because he felt “a need for a conversation with that young lieutenant.”

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Born: 1970

Quick Study: Alexander Ilichevsky is known for dense prose that often combines philosophy, classical touches, and settings as diverse as Azerbaijan and the hidden tunnels of the Moscow Metro.

The Ilichevsky File: Poet and prose writer Alexander Ilichevsky’s first book, a poetry collection, was published in 1996, several years after he received his degree in physics and began a career in science. Ilichevsky won the 2007 Russian Booker Prize for his novel Matisse, about a Moscow physicist who gives up a comfortable life to wander. He won second prize in the 2010 Big Book competition for The Persian, which draws on his childhood memories of Azerbaijan and was also shortlisted for the Yasnaya Polyana award. Ilichevsky’s The Mathematician (2011) and Anarchists (2012) finish a “square” of four books that began with Matisse and The Persian. Ilichevsky followed Anarchists with City of Sunset, a book of essays about Jerusalem that has themes that connect with his novels.

Psssst………: Ilichevsky worked as a systems programmer for Intel in California during the 1990s. Matisse and The Persian will be published in French and German translations in 2013.

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Born: 1943

Quick Study: Alexander Kabakov achieved instant fame with the perestroika-era publication of No Return, a dystopian novel seen as prophetic because of its descriptions of discord.

The Kabakov File: Alexander Kabakov is a journalist, fiction writer, and playwright who became well-known in 1989 for No Return, a short dystopian novel first published in the journal The Art of Cinema. No Return has been translated into several languages, including English, and adapted into a film. Kabakov, who wrote largely “for his desk” during the Soviet era, followed No Return with novels including The Last Hero (1995) and Nothing’s Lost (2003), which won the second jury prize from the Big Book Award as well as the Apollon Grigoriev Prize. Kabakov co-wrote, with Yevgeny Popov, a book of reminiscences about writer Vasily Aksyonov that was shortlisted for the 2012 Big Book Award. Kabakov has worked at the newspaper Kommersant since 1997 after long stints at Moscow News and Gudok, a railroad industry newspaper.

Psssst………: After graduating from college, Kabakov worked in a missile factory, “I made a big contribution to our never attacking anyone,” he said in a 1996 interview, adding, “Seriously, I know this well from the inside. Building missiles is a bigger bluff than our famous ballet. I remember well how we designed the warheads that they paraded around Red Square in sixty-five.” After unsatisfying work on missiles (he says many exploded on the launch site) and in engineering, Kabakov ended up at the railroad industry newspaper Gudok, where he worked for 17 years.

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Born: 1960

Quick Study: Margarita Khemlin gives her characters unique voices that tell stories of twentieth-century Jewish lives and fates, some inspired by her own relatives.

The Khemlin File: Margarita Khemlin writes novels and stories about her native Ukraine, focusing on Jewish themes and characters as she explores the legacy of World War 2 and Soviet policies. Khemlin, who studied at the Gorky Literary Institute and has worked as a journalist, writes with dark humor, often using language infused with a Soviet-era twang. Two of Khemlin’s books—a short story collection called The Living Line and her first novel, Klotsvog—were shortlisted for, respectively, the 2008 Big Book and the 2010 Russian Booker awards. Her 2012 novel, The Investigator, takes place in 1950s Ukraine and involves a murder investigation. 

Psssst………: Khemlin often speaks to readers about her family, showing artifacts that inspire her writing, including a fork that her great grandmother brought to Ukraine from London.

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Born: 1986

Quick Study: Polina Klyukina is a journalist and fiction writer who depicts harsh realities of Russian life.

The Klyukina File: Polina Klyukina won the Debut award for short prose in 2009 after making the prize’s short list in 2008. Klyukina studied journalism in Moscow and has written for publications including Russian Newspaper. She began writing at 17 and was first published in the Russian “thick” journal Novyi mir in 2009 when she was still a student at the Moscow Literary Institute. Klyukina’s first book, a short story collection called Fight or Flight, was released in 2012. 

Psssst………: Klyukina’s first post-secondary education was in stage direction.

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Born: 1972

Vladimir Kozlov was born in 1972 in Mogilev, an industrial city in the eastern part of what was then the Belorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, and spent his childhood and adolescence in the suburbs of that city, witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire and the advent of post-Soviet “wild” capitalism. Kozlov is the author of a dozen books of prose and non-fiction, including Gopniki (“Hoods”) (2002), SSSR (“USSR”) (2009, long-listed for the Big Book Prize), and Domoy (“The Return”) (2010, long-listed for the National Bestseller Award). His non-fiction books include Realnaya Kultura (“True Culture”) (2008), Fanaty (“Soccer Fans”) (2008) and Emo (2007). Two of Kozlov’s books have been published in French translation, and several short stories have been published in English in US literary journals and in the anthology Rasskazy: New Fiction from a New Russia (Tin House Books, 2009).

Born: 1970

Quick Study: Maya Kucherskaya is a literary critic, professor of literature, teacher of creative writing, and writer of fiction and nonfiction.

The Kucherskaya File: Maya Kucherskaya’s highly diverse writings cover fiction—her first novel The Rain God won the Student Booker, while her second novel, Auntie Mina, won the Big Book Reader’s Choice Award—as well as scholarly works, book reviews, and Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy, a book about Russian Orthodoxy. Kucherskaya has worked in other genres, too: she wrote a biography of Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich Romanov for the celebrated Lives of Extraordinary People series, as well as a book of gospel stories for children. She’s also a literature columnist for the newspaper Vedomosti.

Psssst………: Kucherskaya’s professional interests, as listed on the site of the Higher School of Economics, where she teaches, include Nikolai Leskov, Russian mass literature in the second half of the nineteenth century, contemporary Russian prose, and twentieth-century European literature. iIn 2015, Kucherskaya and Natalya Osipova started the Creative Writing School, which they billed as the first program in Russia to give students professional, systematic, MFA-style training as creative writers.

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Born: 1966

Quick Study: Sergey Kuznetsov’s writings include a monograph on Joseph Brodsky’s poetics, translations of Stephen King and Susan Sontag, and the novel The Circle Dance of Water, a family saga shortlisted for the 2011 Big Book Award.

The Kuznetsov File: Kuznetsov’s fiction before The Circle Dance of Water includes a trilogy of detective novels, Butterfly Skin about a serial killer, and No, a futuristic novel written in collaboration with Linor Goralik. Kuznetsov, who has been writing for the Internet since the mid-1990s, founded Sergey Kuznetsov Content Group in 2003 to work on journalism and social media projects, the most prominent of which is Buknik, a site focused on Jewish culture.

Psssst………: Kuznetsov studied chemistry at Moscow State University… And he says he believes books should be available at no charge: he puts his own texts in online libraries.

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Born: 1956

Quick Study: Pavel Lembersky is a fiction writer, screenwriter, and columnist with a background in comp lit and film.

The Lembersky File: Pavel Lembersky is an Odessa-born writer who came to the United States in 1977 and writes in English and Russian. Lembersky’s Russian-language novel Aboard the 500th Merry Echelon was released in 2011, and he has published three collections of short stories in Russian: River #7, The City Of Vanishing Spaces, and A Unique Occurrence. Lembersky also contributes pieces to such Russian publications as Snob, Teatr, and OpenSpace.ru. Lembersky, who studied film in graduate school, has worked in New York’s radio and film industry, too.

Psssst………: Lembersky’s film work has included projects with Jonathan Demme and Spalding Gray… He wrote articles about Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin concerts for OpenSpace.ru.

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Quick Study: Vadim Levental is a writer, literary critic, and editor. 

The Levental File: Levental was born in Leningrad and studied acting in college, but eventually majored in literary criticism and editing at St. Petersburg State University. He has published fiction, criticism, and essays in Zvezda, Oktyabr, Izvestiya, Volga, and other periodicals since 2005, and as editor at Limbus Press he edited books and collections of all kinds, from Victor Hugo’s essays to an anthology of short stories about soccer. In 2011, he compiled and edited the Literary Matrix, a 4-volume collection of essays by contemporary Russian writers about the Russian literary canon; the Matrix achieved national fame as one of the most successful literary projects of the post-Soviet period. His first novel, Masha Regina (2012), was shortlisted for the Big Book prize and nominated for the Russian Booker Prize; his second book, a collection of stories called The Fright Room, came out in 2015. Levental is executive secretary of the National Bestseller Prize, coordinator of the Grigoriev Poetry Prize and a member of the St Petersburg Writers’ Union. In 2016, he represented Russia at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. He is married with one child. 

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