Iosif Efimovich Aleshkovsky, known as Yuz Aleshkovsky, was a modern Russian writer, poet, playwright, and performer of his own songs. He was born on September 21, 1929, Krasnoyarsk, Russia. In 1949 Aleshkovsky was drafted into the Soviet Navy, but because of breaking the disciplinary code, he had to serve four years in jail (1950–1953). After serving the term, Aleshkovsky moved back to Moscow and began writing books for children. Aleshkovsky wrote songs and performed them. Some, especially “Товарищ Сталин, вы большой ученый” (“Comrade Stalin, you are a great scholar”) and “Окурочек” (“Little cigarette butt”), became extremely popular in the Soviet Union and are considered folk classics. Aleshkovsky also wrote screenplays for movies and television in the Soviet Union. He emigrated from the USSR in 1979. In addition to his songs, his work includes eleven novels, a collection of short stories, two novellas for children, and four well-known screenplays.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
In this collection, Andrey Kneller has woven together his own poems with his translations of one of the most recognized and celebrated contemporary Russian poets, Vera Pavlova.
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.