Vasily Aksyonov, Exiled Soviet Writer, Is Dead at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com

Chatter abounds on the merits of Obama’s Russia trip, an intriguing Russian writer, Vasily Aksyonov,  passes on–another reason I must be getting older as I enjoy these obits more and more.  Over at Volokh Consipiracy, the observation that “unlike such Russian nationalist dissidents as Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aksyonov advocated liberal democracy, opposed anti-Semitism, and deplored the recent revival of authoritarian Russian nationalism under Vladimir Putin.”  Why he matters:

“Solzhenitsyn is all about the imprisonment and trying to get out, and Aksyonov is the young person whose mother got out and he actually can live his life now,” said Nina L. Khrushcheva, who is a great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev and a friend of the Aksyonov family and who teaches international affairs at the New School in New York. “It was important to have the Aksyonov light, that light of personal freedom and personal self-expression.”

via Vasily Aksyonov, Exiled Soviet Writer, Is Dead at 76 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com.

And what to read:

• “The Burn” is a surreal, jazz-inspired riff on the plight of intellectuals under Communism, and “Island of Crimea” imagines what life would have been like on the Black Sea peninsula if the White Army had staved off the Bolsheviks there during the Russian Civil War and their descendants had flourished.
• ”Island of Crimea,” an eerily prescient, tragicomic deconstruction of Russia’s split personality, was written two decades before Vladimir V. Putin started mixing the Bolshevik and pre-revolutionary strains in Russian culture in the search for a new Russian identity.