Background
Aksyonov Vasily Pavlovich came from the family of political workers (unreasonably repressed in the late 1930s).
Aksyonov Vasily Pavlovich came from the family of political workers (unreasonably repressed in the late 1930s).
Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg in Kazan, USSR. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents "were prominent communists." In 1937, however, both were arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. They were both sent to Gulag and then to exile, and "each served 18 years, but remarkably survived." "Later, Yevgenia came to prominence as the author of a famous memoir, Into the Whirlwind, documenting the brutality of Stalinist repression."
Aksyonov remained in Kazan with his nanny and grandmother until the NKVD arrested him as a son of "enemies of the people", and sent him to an orphanage without providing his family any information on his whereabouts.Aksyonov "remained there until rescued in 1938 by his uncle, with whose family he stayed until his mother was released into exile, having served 10 years of forced labour." "In 1947, Vasily joined her in exile in the notorious Magadan, Kolyma prison area, where he graduated from high school." Vasily's half-brother Alexei (from Ginzburg's first marriage to Dmitriy Fedorov) died from starvation in besieged Leningrad in 1941.
His parents, seeing that doctors had the best chance to survive in the camps, decided that Aksyonov should go into the medical profession."He therefore entered the Kazan University and graduated in 1956 from the First Pavlov State Medical University of St. Peterburg" and worked as a doctor for the next 3 years. During his time as a medical student he came under surveillance by the KGB, who began to prepare a file against him. It is likely that he would have been arrested had the liberalisation that followed Stalin's death in 1953 not intervened.
Until 1960 he worked as a doctor. He was published since 1959 (Youth magazine ). He was one of the leaders of young prose at the turn of the 1950-1960s (the stories Colleagues, Star Ticket, Oranges from Morocco and others). In the summer of 1980 he went to the United States, soon was deprived of Soviet citizenship. He was a teacher in several American universities. At the end of September 2005, as a laureate of the Booker-Open Russia Prize (2004) he visited the city of Voronezh, where he got acquainted with literary sights, met with students-philologists from the Voronezh State University, readers in the Voronezh Regional Universal Scientific Library named after I.S. Nikitin, the clerisy in the House of actor, journalists in the editorial office of the Voronezh Courier newspaper.
Vasily Aksyonov was a convinced anti-totalitarian. On the presentation of one of his last novels, he stated: "If in this country one starts erecting Stalin statues again, I have to reject my native land. Nothing else remains.
"When I was in Kazan during my student years, I was under surveillance by the KGB. I didn’t realize it at first—it was only after they began "inviting" my friends in to talk that I realized they were following me, and our whole group. It wasn’t like it is here at an American university—we were all one group in our class, a group of about 30 which existed together the entire six years of study; we had all of our classes together and were all living together. "
— Vasily Aksyonov remembers his life as a student
Vasily Aksyonov was born to Pavel Aksyonov and Yevgenia Ginzburg in Kazan, USSR. His mother, Yevgenia Ginzburg, was a successful journalist and educator and his father, Pavel Aksyonov, had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both parents were prominent communists.