Three Books

"With these three books (in one) Vladimir Azarov moves toward the completion of what has turned out to be a most extraordinary 10-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 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, in Exile in his own country, and his writing that transformed the language, and thereby the peoples' perceptions of themselves, including the young Azarov. In book two, On "The Death of Ivan Ilych," Azarov - who is now a professional architect - imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy's great character, Ivan Ilych, 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, Azarov 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 witnessed the atomic testing at Bikini Atoll. Together they would talk while imagining into existence the spirit of Rita Hayworth, riding on the side of the bomb in her negligee, to help make sense of such a world."--