Böcker av Vladimir Azarov

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.

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.

With these three books (in one) Vladimir Azarov moves toward the completion of what has turned out to be a most extraordinary ten-book autobiography, and the recollections of a young man in Moscow during the tumultuous times after Joseph Stalin's death and the days under Nikita Khrushchev, known as The Thaw.

In August of 1962 I took my first vacation. Lying on a Sochi beach, I opened a newspaper and there I saw the big story: MARILYN MONROE DEAD! This was also the time of the Khrushchev Thaw in Soviet life, and I had chanced to see Billy Wilder's great film, Some Like It Hot, featuring that unbelievable beauty, that force of nature, Marilyn Monroe. There on the beach she did not die for me; she settled into my heart. Sochi became, in my memory, not a town but a bell tolling my bond with her. Sochi then… Sochi now… Without warning, while watching the Olympics on television, I came down with a severe flu and a weeklong fever that peaked often at 103. She came to me again. My Sochi Beatrice, guiding me through decades of memories in my feverish delirium, accompanying me through a waltzing kaleidoscope of times 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. I wrote poem upon poem, until this book became what it is – my Sochi delirium.

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.