Writers

Pavel Basinsky

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. 

Basinsky’s Places: Born in Frolovo, a small city in the Volgograd region. Attended Saratov University and Moscow’s Gorky Literary Institute, where he studied criticism and received a PhD in comp lit. Has written about Yasnaya Polyana, where Leo Tolstoy lived. (He is also on the jury of the Yasnaya Polyana literary award.)

The Word on Basinsky: A Russian Newspaper article on Basinsky winning 2010 Book of the Year quotes Vladimir Tolstoy of the Yasnaya Polyana Museum saying Flight from Paradise is “very delicate, and precise on the facts.” Writer and critic Dmitry Bykov says in the article that there is certainly no more humane book about Tolstoy.

Basinsky on Basinsky: After winning the Big Book Award, Basinsky was quoted in First Newspaper in Volgograd as saying he visits Yasnaya Polyana regularly and feels there as if he’s in “another dimension,” sensing the world and himself differently. That led him to wonder why Tolstoy would want to leave.

On Writing: When asked by a reader why he named his book Flight from Paradise, Basinsky replied, “Paradise is a metaphor that consists of the Yasnaya Polyana estate and Tolstoy’s family. This metaphor is fairly ironic since at the end of his days, Tolstoy wrote: ‘In this house, I am being boiled like in hell.’”

Basinsky Recommends: Basinsky wrote his dissertation about Maxim Gorky and Friedrich Nietzsche. He has compiled books with works by such poets and prose writers as Gorky, Leonid Andreev, Osip Mandel’shtam, and Mikhail Kuzmin.

Psssst….........: Basinsky is such a big figure in the Russian literary world that he appears, under slightly altered names, in the works of Viktor Pelevin, who called him “Bisinsky” in Homo Zapiens and “A Concise History of Paintball in Moscow,” and Vladimir Sorokin, whose Day of the Oprichnik includes one “Pavlo Basinia.”

Basinsky’s Places: Born in Frolovo, a small city in the Volgograd region. Attended Saratov University and Moscow’s Gorky Literary Institute, where he studied criticism and received a PhD in comp lit. Has written extensively about Yasnaya Polyana, where Leo Tolstoy lived.

Basinsky on Titles: When asked by a reader why he named his book Flight from Paradise, Basinsky replied, “Paradise is a metaphor that consists of the Yasnaya Polyana estate and Tolstoy’s family. This metaphor is fairly ironic since at the end of his days, Tolstoy wrote: ‘In this house, I am being boiled like in hell.’”

Basinsky on Writing: This interviewer asks, “What mistakes do young writers make most often?” Basinsky’s reply: “Their openings are too long. I feel like telling them all to start like Olesha: ‘In the morning, he’d be singing in the toilet.’ A single phrase, but right away everything’s crystal clear.”   

Basinsky on Tolstoy: In a 2016 interview, Basinsky writes that Tolstoy had little money or possessions to give the supplicants who thronged to his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, because “he gave everything to his wife and children, including the rights to Anna Karenina and War and Peace. The Count himself had only one source of income, from the production of his plays “The Power of Darkness” and “The Fruits of Enlightenment.” He’d have refused that money, too, but what stopped him was the general rule of the time: if an author did not collect his share of the theater’s profits, it was automatically donated to the ballet. But Lev Nikolayevich couldn’t stand ballet.”

Basinsky on Reading: In 2015, Basinsky points out, “right now the problem isn’t what kind of books to buy; right now the problem is far more serious, far worse. The problem is whether people will even read books at all, as well as buy them. Because, when people say to me, ‘Oh, how horrible, they’re reading that Dontsova,’ I say, ‘But you’ve got to understand that they are reading Dontsova, they’re not watching the TV series.’” 

Photo credit: Creative Commons, Cybersky


More on Pavel Basinsky

Major Awards & Nominations:

  • The Saint vs. the Lion: St. John of Kronstadt and Leo Tolstoy, or the History of an Enmity – winner, Government of the Russian Federation Prize for Cultural Achievement, 2014
  • Leo Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise – winner, Big Book Award, 2010; named Book of the Year at the 2010 Moscow Book Fair.
  • A Russian Novel, Or the Life and Adventures of John Polovinkin – finalist, Big Book Award, 2008
  • The AntiBooker Prize’s Ray of Light Award for literary criticism – 1998 

Translations:

  • Leo Tolstoy: Flight From Paradise, tr. Huw Davies and Scott Moss, Glagoslav, 2015

Other Selected Titles:

  • Leo Tolstoy: A Free Man (Лев Толстой – свободный человек), 2016
  • In his Father’s Shadow: Leo, Tolstoy’s Son (Лев в тени Льва), 2015 
  • No Fiddlers Need Apply: A Critical Affair (Скрипач не нужен. Роман с критикой), 2014
  • The Passion of Maxim: The Nine Days After the Death of Gorky (Страсти по Максиму. Горький: девять дней после смерти), 2010
  • Maxim Gorky. Myth and Biography (Максим Горький. Миф и биография), 2008
  • Gorky (Горький), 2005.
  • Prisoner of Moscow (Московский пленник), 2004

Links: