Biography

Author critical of the Soviet regime, he lived in Germany and got back his Russian citizenship in the 1990s. His anticipation novel Moscow 2042 published in 1987 has bizarre similarities with the Putin era.

His mother was a teacher of Jewish heritage. His father, of Serbian heritage, was a literary translator and journalist who was arrested in 1936 after criticizing Stalin; he spent five years in forced-labor camps.

His citizenship was rescinded by Leonid Brezhnev, but was restored under Gorbachev. As the Soviet Union became the Russian Federation, he went from national outcast to literary hero, winning the State Prize for his 2000 novel "Monumental Propaganda," about a communist fanatic who rescues a statue of Stalin from demolition by moving it into her apartment. However, official support once again declined as he became an outspoken critic of the Putin regime.

He first gained national fame in the early 1960s, when he wrote a song, loosely translated as "Fourteen Minutes to Liftoff", that became a favorite of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

I wanted to be a realist, writing about what I saw. Almost like journalism. But when I published my work, which I thought was really true-to-life, they said, 'You're writing satire.' I wasn't, it was just life that was so absurd. The more I've depicted life, the deeper I've gone, the more I've become a satirist. Or so they say.