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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.
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