In the first book, Winter in the Country, Azarov imagines the enormous presence of the great poet, Pushkin, and his influence on the development of the modern Russian psyche. In On "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" he imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy's great character, Ivan Ilyich, who suffered and died from a terminal illness. In doing so, he enlarges his own personal experience by giving the death of a close friend a mythic dimension. In the third book, An Atomic Cake, he explores a Moscow world of wild contradictions, surreal social hysteria, and periods of massive malaise, all occurring under the cloud of atomic bomb testing. This is when he met a passionate computer specialist whose father had witnessed the American atomic testing at Bikini Atoll. Together, trying to make sense of such a world, they talked, imagining into existence the spirit of Rita Hayworth as she rode on the side of the bomb in her negligee.

Vladimir Azarov was a child of the Soviet Kazakhstan steppes. When his mother discovered that he had a slight curvature of the spine, with her own loving humor she nicknamed him Richie, after Richard III, the 14th century English king, himself crooked, made famous as a monster by Shakespeare. At the same time Azarov suffered a vision-altering wound to his eye that transformed the way he perceived the world, both real and imagined. The wound eventually healed and, as he grew up feeling a wry kinship to the king, his bent eye became that of a visionary, of an artist who was a convention-breaking architect, and finally as a poet, not writing in Russian, but in the King's English. When, not long ago, the actual bones of Richard III were found under a parking lot in Leicester town, Azarov - now in his 80s living in Toronto, and remembering his kinship by name - envisioned the archeological dig and re-interment of the bones, and he became one in his mind with the reputation-renovated and redeemed king. He became, at last, Richie-Richard III, being sung to on a rainy day, over a new grave, by medieval knights.

A wonderful look at Soviet-era life as witnessed from the edge of the empire, this book is comprised of letters, poems, and prose pieces that together create a narrative. Through an entirely original form, Vladimir Azarov, who trained to be an architect in Moscow during Stalin's Iron Curtain years, begins with a simple exploratory exchange of letters between him and a faceless bureaucrat during his days overseeing the design and construction of the Soviet Embassy in the isolated republic of Mongolia. What follows is an unfolding sequence that finds Azarov meeting a remarkable Mongolian woman and later discovering the memoirs of one of Russia's greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova, eventually revealing an unlikely love story between the Mongolian woman and Akhmatova's son. This enthralling account serves as both a cultural study and an exploration of the human condition.

Few moments, certainly few speeches, in the 20th century so radically altered the flow of international events and specifically the direction of Russian history as Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 attack on the cult of Joseph Stalin. Overnight, a society under the lock and key of ideology and the eye of a secret police was sprung loose, entering into a period that has since come to be known as "the Thaw." Suddenly, citizens like the young Moscow architect, Vladimir Azarov, were free to read banned Russian writers like Solzhenitsyn, to attend concerts by stars like Marlene Dietrich, and free to go not only to Berlin but on to Paris. Azarov has written 26 monologues, each devoted to recollecting sunburst moments of freedom, moments of awareness when millions of people were suddenly coming in from the great cold of Stalin's years of terror.

An unyielding fever of 103, the Sochi Olympics, and a state of inspirational semidelirium came together as Vladimir Azarov sat in front of his television, images swirled in his mind like a waltzing kaleidoscope. Memories from decades past were triggered as the Pussy Riot girls were being whipped by Cossacks. Marilyn Monroe of Some Like It Hot became his muse while he composed recollections: his first trip to Sochi in 1962; sitting with Henry Moore at his home in Much Haddam; discussing verisimilitudes with Pasolini, art with Frank O'Hara, film and acting with Leni Riefenstahl; shock at terrorists killing Israelis in Munich. As the 2014 Games ended, his fever abated. This remarkable book of poems arose from those two weeks.

Vladimir Azarov grew up and came to maturity during a time in the Soviet Union when penal camps and the secret police were ubiquitous, but the one great truth that he and the world learned from all the great Russian writers, and that he learned in his own life in political exile, is that almost everything can be taken from an individual but his or her story, his or her undying and unyielding sense of self. No matter what, the self perseveres, even in the most perverse and punishing circumstances. Azarov, in his own plainspoken voice, has composed seven stories about seven lives that are marvelously moving in their seeming simplicity, their actual depth. "Seven Lives" is Vladimir Azarov's childhood experiences of Soviet life transformed into a poetic witnessing.

Celebrating three Russian literary greats-Alexander Pushkin, Anna Akhmatova, and Andrei Voznesensky-this collection of their writing presents new translations of a combined 44 poems and includes both Russian and English text. Nearly 20 artworks-from colour monoprints to black-and-white collages, illustrations, and photographs-by Pushkin, Voznesensky, Amadeo Modigliani, Nikolai Tyrsa, and Claire Weissman Wilks are also included, opening an artistic dialogue with the poems and the reader. Alexander Pushkin is, perhaps, the greatest of Russian poets and considered the founder of modern Russian literature. Anna Akhmatova is Russia's singular female poet and perhaps the greatest in Western culture. Andrei Voznesensky was considered one of the most daring writers of the Soviet era, and before his death he was both critically and popularly acclaimed. These three master poets are brought together with masterful translations that engage their many complexities and are a must for personal or academic interests in Russian literature or poetry in general.

Providing a rare and creative sense of authority's various faces, this collection of poems travels from intellectual and artistic power to philosophical, military, and imperial power; and above all, personal influence. The verse introduces the persuasiveness, complexities, and intrigues of "table talk"--a European tradition of informed and enlightened conversation that has virtually disappeared from the experience of North American culture. Commanding and informed in their own sense of purpose, these pieces evince a gentle curiosity for greatness, creating an engaging portrait of simple humanity, powerful minds, and memorable ideas.

In On The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Azarov imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy's great character, Ivan Ilyich, who - as the story progresses - becomes more and more introspective and emotional while he ponders the reason for his own agonizing illness and death. In doing so, Azarov enlarges his personal experience by giving the most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible death of a close friend a mythic dimension... Azarov's fear of death leaves him, and as Tolstoy suggested, the terror attached to death itself disappears.