Staring at the World With an Ironic Gaze

On August 20, Vassily Aksyonov turns 70. The son of party leader Pavel Aksyonov and author Yevgeniya Ginsburg (Into the Whirlwind), Aksyonov spent part of his childhood in Magadan, where his mother was incarcerated.

A trained doctor (in 1965 he graduated from the Leningrad Medical Institute), Aksyonov dedicated his first short novel, Colleagues, to three doctor friends. As such, he began carving a niche in the so-called “youth prose” of the time. (The book was later turned into a film of the same name.) Subsequent works were published in the aptly named literary journal Yunost (“Youth”) including “Ticket to the Stars” (1961), and “Oranges From Morocco” (1963).

Most of Aksyonov’s heroes are young physicists or doctors with lyrical souls who stare at the world with an ironic gaze, and are fans of jazz, sports and fashionable clothes. Needless to say, this was hardly the right combination of traits to please Soviet critics and censors.

Aksyonov felt that “reality is so absurd that by using the method of ‘absurdization’ and surrealism, the writer sort of tries to harmonize the disintegrating reality.” In 1979, Aksyonov was one of the founders of the maverick literary almanac Metropol—the first alternative to the official Soviet literary organizations, a journal which published such great writers as Andrei Bitov, Andrei Voznesensky, Bella Akhmadulina and Yuz Aleshkovsky, to name just a few. This activity automatically classified Aksyonov as a “dissident,” which, in July 1980, led to his emigration to the US.

Since emigration, Aksyonov has taught Russian literature at US universities (he currently teaches at George Mason University) and published several novels, including The Burn (1980), the anti-utopian The Island of Crimea (1981), In Search of Melancholy Baby (1987), Generations of Winter (1994), A Winter’s Hero (1996) and The New Sweet Style (1999). Beginning in the 1990s, Aksyonov became a frequent visitor to Moscow where he gives interviews, participates in TV and radio shows and where his books are now widely published.