20 August 1932 year
В Kazan, He was born into the family of a party worker and a journalist Vasily Aksenov. Writer. One of the idols of the "thaw" generation.
A man is as free as he is free inside.
Vasily wasn't even five when his parents were sentenced to 15 and 10 years in prison. He lived for a year in a shelter for children of "enemies of the people," then with his aunt. He believed his parents were "polar heroes."
At 15 he moved to Magadan in exile to his mother, Evgenia Ginzburg, who, after the camps, wrote “The Steep Route,” one of the first books about the repressions.
He graduated from medical school, was known as a hipster as a student, and was the first to introduce the word “jeans” into the Russian language.
From Aksyonov's denim jacket, as from Gogol's "The Overcoat," emerged all of modern Russian literature (writer Evgeny Popov)
He dreamed of seeing the world by becoming a ship's doctor, but due to his "unreliable" biography, he worked as a quarantine doctor in ports.
He also began publishing, writing ironically about Soviet reality. For "Star Ticket" (and the film based on it), he was accused of bowing to the West.
In 1966, he was arrested on Red Square for participating in a demonstration against Stalin's rehabilitation. He signed letters in defense of dissidents.
Since the late 60s, he has ceased to be published as an "anti-Soviet." He wrote for the "desktop" and for samizdat.
In 1980, he left for the United States and lost his Soviet citizenship. He taught Russian literature. There, he also published "The Island of Crimea," written in his homeland: a story about a prosperous island state whose entire existence collapsed after one of its residents became obsessed with the idea of joining the USSR.
I will live in our world, in my world, where there is a shortage of everything, where everyone is afraid of everything, yes, yes, this is a more normal world; I will get a job somewhere as a saleswoman or a storekeeper at a food depot, I will steal and feel like a normal person
Aksyonov's citizenship was returned only after perestroika.
Until 2004, he lived in America, where he wrote “Moscow Saga,” about several generations of a Soviet family.
He declared that he would renounce his homeland if they began to restore monuments to Stalin.
He died in 2009 in Moscow after a stroke. He was 76.
