Sasha Sokolov

Sasha Sokolov (Russian Саша Соколов, officially Александр Всеволодович Соколов / Vsyevolodovitch Alexander Sokolov, scientific transliteration Aleksandr Sokolov Vsevolodovič, sometimes also in the transcription Sasha Sokolov; born November 6, 1943 in Ottawa, Canada ) is a Russian writer.

He became world famous mid-1970s by the publication of his 1974 novel written "The school of fools " and is considered one of the major Russian writers of the 20th century.

Life

Sokolov was born the son of a attaché of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada and has lived and worked in the United States.

His family left Canada in 1946 because Sokolov's father was revealed as a member of a military spy ring. In 1962, Sokolov studying at the Military Institute of Foreign Languages ​​on, but was released in 1965. Background for this event was apparently a failed attempt Sokolov to leave the Soviet Union illegally. In 1966 he began studying journalism at Moscow University, after he had says that it, belongs to a literary underground group. From 1967 on he published journalistic articles and short stories, and married in the same year. In 1971 he completed his studies. 1974 his first daughter was born and the marriage ended in divorce.

Sokolov graduated in 1975 in Moscow, first friendship and then a marriage with the Austrian Johanna Steindl, who taught at Moscow University and German began in the sequence with some of spectacular funds for his departure. She led in the Stephansdom in Vienna on a hunger strike and won by celebrities for their concerns (eg, the former Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and the Vienna Cardinal Franz König ). After the success of these efforts was the author whose manuscript was smuggled out of the school of fools Steindl from the former Soviet Union, a visa to emigrate to Austria. There he married Johanna Steindl again, as a civil marriage in the Soviet Union had not been possible. After his first novel was published in the United States, Sokolov wandered the end of 1976 to the United States, leaving his pregnant wife in Vienna. His son came in March 1977 on the world and later became a journalist.

The novel " The School of the stupid " received an enthusiastic response in part, including with Vladimir Nabokov. During this until 1989, published in Russia Roman ( Germany 1993), which was written without regard to the censorship, it is the report a schizophrenic auxiliary student who im with himself or his alter ego dialogue recognizes critical- naive the prevailing conditions in the USSR. Sokolov propose here a tone that reminds one hand, to the monologues of Buck Mulligan in Joyce's Ulysses, on the other hand, a very own private universe opened, in which he constantly crosses the boundaries between fantasy and reality. This work virtuously written may be in his system understood as a spiral or circle, in which the question of identity and transcendence is discussed continually. in the Russian original plays about the conditioning of the novel addition to its tonal composition and the possible associations a special role. In the TIME Iris Radisch wrote: " There is nothing to get. No late - socialist era chart, no panorama of the Soviet endgame. Just the luck of the stupidity that is contagious. Only the unbridled language, the wild, trusting conversational tone, that settles like a never- heard music in the ear. Only the heartbeat of a galloping, reckless, anarchic literature, which makes us feel happy and sad and dizzy and you will not forget. "

Sokolov succeeded after the publication of the novel " school of the stupid " not to build on its success. His second novel, Between Dog and Wolf, lives even more on the specifics of the Russian language and is therefore considered untranslatable (only one Polish and one of them derived English translation exist). appeared in 1985 his third book. The finished manuscript of his fourth novel said to have been destroyed in a fire in Greece. Allegedly writes Sokolov on, but do not want to be published.

Trivia

Sokolov's sister Ludmilla Sokolova is active as a poet. Her first book of poems was published in 2010 in Vienna in Russian.

Works (selection)

Awards (selection)

Two prices of Russian underground magazines in the 1980s