1932 was born in Kazan. Mother Ye Fu Geniya ginzburg was the author of the famous memoir Ring Road. In the late 1930s, Ak Senov's parents were purged and exiled to Makadan. It was not until 16 years old that he met his mother for the first time in exile. Although it seems unreasonable to live there for several years, Makadan's life is surprisingly free: in the evening, there are often salon-style parties in his mother's board room. Among this group of intellectuals who have been in labor camps, Ak Senov heard many things that he had never thought of before. They discuss a wide range of issues and often talk about the fate of mankind. All these have brought a deep shock to later writers.
From 65438 to 0956, Ak Senov graduated from Leningrad Medical College. 1960 worked as a doctor before, and worked in the northernmost region, Karelia, Leningrad Maritime Terminal and Moscow Tuberculosis Hospital. His literary reputation began in the 1960s when Soviet culture thawed. In the same year, he published his first novel in Youth magazine, the novella Colleague, 1960, and gradually became the backbone of young and cutting-edge writers in the Soviet Union. Since then, he has created Train Tickets with Stars (196 1), On the Way to the Moon (1962), Moroccan Oranges (1963) and so on. This made him feel fashionable and out of step with his work. These works are all about rebellious Soviet society and young people who are incompatible with society. Ak Senov is good at using simple and vivid slang. Although he still has collectivism ideals like the previous generation, he is also attracted by western culture.
His "Train Ticket with Stars" (звёздныйбилет) describes a rebellious teenager Jimka who is bent on seeking truth and doing good deeds. Two years later, this book began to circulate underground in China as a famous "Yellow Book". It nourishes a generation of literary youth, and even in Wang Shuo's novels, we can see its charm. "I never knew that a train ticket with stars had such a tortuous story in China." In 2006, Ak Senov told a China reporter who interviewed him, "No one has ever told me. I was so surprised to hear the news from you for the first time. I didn't even know that this book was published in China. "
As a writer who experienced that special period, Ak Senov no longer followed blindly like his predecessors, but devoted himself to literary creation with his personal feelings about social life. A Train Ticket with Stars portrays a sensitive and rebellious teenager, Jim Ka. The novel describes how the protagonist and his companions jump out of the "hypocritical" adult world to find purity and truth, and finally find their own home and love. The bohemian and cynical narrative tone in the novel can be said to be the first to open the atmosphere. Ak Senov's books had sold about 5 million copies in the Soviet Union before they were officially classified as heterogeneous in the mid-Kloc-0/970s.
In his later novels, such as Unseasonable Barrel Goods (1968) and Crimea Island (198 1), Ak Senov began to inject more fantasy, irony and exaggeration. His maverick style aroused the dissatisfaction of the authorities. Ak Senov participated in organizing and editing the unofficial collection of literary works "Metropolis", promoting works of different genres and themes, and paying attention to aesthetic exploration. Ak Senov recalled: We did this openly, and at that time, the national security department also knew that just as we were about to hold the launching ceremony at1October 23rd,1979,65438+,the central authorities found us through the writers' association and tried to stop it. Although the publication finally withstood the pressure of relevant parties and was published in the United States in time, several authors were severely criticized and expelled from the Soviet Writers Association. That year, Ak Senov voluntarily withdrew from the Writers' Association, was forced to leave the United States the following year, and was soon revoked Soviet citizenship. Since then, he has been in exile for 24 years.
He soon entered the university teaching circle. He taught Russian literature at a university in Washington until he retired from George Mei Sen University in early 2004. When asked about the living conditions in the United States, Ak Senov expressed satisfaction. When talking about creation, he said that although his performance in the American literary circle can be described as positive, he has never felt himself in the literary sense. 1990, before resuming Soviet nationality, he often went to Europe not too far from Russia to write. Later, he simply moved from America to a small French town in the Bay of Biscay.
Obviously, unlike his predecessor Nabokov, Ak Senov left the soil of his motherland and his writing naturally turned. For him, Russia is the hometown of his soul and the starting point of his story. Even in the long years of exile, he wrote stories about Russia almost without exception, especially after returning home. Burning is one of his later masterpieces, which is a rare fusion of memory, fantasy and documentary. He tried to use this work to summarize the spiritual induction of Russian intellectuals to the motherland. Another novel, Smile, written in 1985, depicts the group images of Moscow intellectuals in Brezhnev's late reign. 1994 published the trilogy The Legend of Moscow, which tells the story of a Soviet family from 19 17 to 1953. Ten years later, the book was adapted into a TV series. 1998 won the Russian National Literature and Art Award. The novel Voltaire Men and Women, which won the Russian Booker Prize in the same year, was inspired by the tryst history of philosophers Voltaire and Catherine II. According to historical records, the two celebrities kept close contacts and left a lot of letters, but they never met. In this historical novel with rich allegorical color, Ak Senov enlarges a passage in the complicated Russian history and makes up a fascinating story at will.
Rare Elements, written at the age of 75, is, in a sense, Ak Senov's tribute to the Soviet chemist Mendeleev. This novel tells the story of a family. In 1980s, all the members of this family used to be party member, but in 199 1, with the changes of society, they became capitalists and owned factories and land. But the good times didn't last long, because the protagonist tried to use the properties of rare elements to create more new substances, which led to various accidents in his factory and eventually went to prison. In order to save her father, the mother tried to rob the prison, and for the safety of her two children, she had to send them to Europe for asylum.
Some critics believe that Ake Senov's novels in his later years are "incomparable to any contemporary writer in terms of formal creation and bold experiments". However, when the Russian Booker Prize was awarded in 2005, as the chairman of the jury, he refused to read the name of the new winner Guinness Guko, and bluntly said that he could not understand the strange style of Guko's novels and thought that he was not worthy of writing novels at all.
This does not prevent him from defending the depressed contemporary Russian literature: despite many problems, it still has strong vitality. "Now many Russian writers write for commercial purposes, and even some serious works have been changed to the titles of popular literature by publishing houses in order to sell well; And many people no longer pay attention to the description of ideology. But this is not just a problem of Russian literature, it is a problem faced by literature all over the world. "
With the passage of time, Ak Senov had no bad feelings about the literary creation in the Soviet period. In the early days of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, some people held a fierce critical attitude towards the literature of this period, thinking that it was only a propaganda tool for politics and ideology. What makes him feel gratified is that people now look at Soviet literature with a very objective attitude, thinking that it was not only the product of ideology, but also something beautiful at that time.
On June 5438+1October 65438+May, 2008, he had a serious stroke on the way and lost consciousness, which led to a traffic accident. Fortunately, there were no casualties. After being taken to the hospital, he underwent surgery, and the doctor successfully removed a thrombus from his carotid artery. But the sequela of the stroke caused his speech disorder and high paralysis.
In February 2009, he was transferred from Burdenko Hospital to Skilifosovsky Institute of Emergency Medicine. A week ago, he suddenly became critically ill. The doctor connected him with an artificial respiration machine and continued to try to treat him, but Vasily pavlovic Ak Senov finally died. On July 6, he died in a hospital in Moscow at the age of 76. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin issued a statement saying that the death of Ak Senov was "a huge and irreparable loss to Russian literature".