Three Books: Winter In the Country / On “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” / An Atomic Cake

With these three books (in one) Vladimir Azarov moves toward the completion of what is now a most extraordinary 19-book autobiography, the recollections of a young man in Moscow during the tumultuous times after Joseph Stalin’s death, known as Khrushchev’s “Thaw.”

In the first book, Winter in the Country, he imagines the enormous presence of the great poet, Pushkin, and his influence on the development of the modern Russian psyche. Pushkin, alone out in the countryside, a writer in exile in his own country, transformed the language, and thereby the peoples’ perceptions of themselves, including the young Azarov.

In On “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” Azarov – then a professional architect – 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. A police state given to bouts of politics by brute force and politics by a sterile force majeure, to moments of 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 negligée.

Vladimir Azarov is an architect and poet, formerly from Moscow, who lives in Toronto. Among his 19 books he has most recently published (with Exile Editions) Of Architecture – with illustrations by Nina Bunjevac, Seven Lives, Broken Pastries, Mongolian Études, Night Out, Dinner With Catherine the Great – and with Barry Callaghan, Strong Words, translations in an English/Russian bilingual edition, of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Pushkin and Andrei Voznesensky.