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Curated category

Soviet male writers

  • Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those…
  • Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed.
  • Mikhail BakhtinMikhail Bakhtin spent six years working as a bookkeeper in the provincial Kazakh town of Kustanai, exiled there by the Soviet secret police.
  • Garry KasparovOn the 9th of November 1985, in Moscow, Garry Kasparov needed only to hold his own against Anatoly Karpov to take the world chess crown.
  • Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938…
  • Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match…
  • Boris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the…
  • Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph…
  • Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin spent his final years in Paris dying in poverty, his name unmentioned in any Soviet newspaper, his most famous novel banned in his own…
  • Dmitry MerezhkovskyDmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and never won it. He co-founded Russian Symbolism, helped invent…