Russian writer and poet Yuz Aleshkovsky died in the USA

Writer and poet Yuz Aleshkovsky died in the USA at the age of 92. This was told by his son Alexei Aleshkovsky, reports with the BBC.

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Since 1979, the writer has lived in the United States, where he was forced to move from the USSR after publishing in samizdat under his last name texts for songs dedicated to the camp theme, reports RBC.

In the 1950s, Yuz Aleshkovsky began to write songs based on his poems, of which the most famous was “Song about Stalin,” which begins with the words “Comrade Stalin, you are a great scientist,” it was written from the perspective of a prisoner.

Yuz Aleshkovsky was born in Krasnoyarsk, went to school in Moscow, after the start of the Great Patriotic War, his family was evacuated to Omsk. In 1949, Aleshkovsky in the Far East, where he served in the military, was sentenced to four years in a camp for violating discipline or, according to other sources, for stealing the car of the secretary of the Primorsky Regional Committee of the Communist Party. After his release, the future writer worked at a construction site, was a driver in the virgin lands, and since 1955, having returned to Moscow, at the Mosvodoprovod enterprise.

In the mid-1950s, Aleshkovsky began to write poetry and songs, he began to earn a living in literature in 1965, being a screenwriter and author of children's stories and fairy tales. Known for his children's works "Two tickets for the train" (1964), "Black-brown Fox" (1967), "Shoo, Two briefcases and a whole week" (1970), "Shoo and I in the Crimea" (1975), as well as scripts for the films “Here is my village” (1972), “Emergency situation” (1973), “Shoo and Two briefcases” (1974), “First and second” (1974), “Incident” (1974), “What is happening to you” (1975).

Aleshkovsky became the author of several novels and stories dedicated to the camp theme, as well as the realities of Soviet life. One of the most famous works of that stage in Aleshkovsky's life is the story "Nikolai Nikolaevich" written in 1979 and published abroad in 1980. It was distributed through samizdat, since it was forbidden to publish such works of the writer in the USSR under the threat of criminal punishment.

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Unofficially, Aleshkovsky acted as a performer of songs based on his own poems. But after the publication of the texts of his songs dedicated to the camp theme, in the self-published almanac Metropol, the writer was forced to emigrate in 1979. Together with his wife and adopted son, Aleshkovsky moved to the United States through Austria, where he settled in the state of Connecticut.

After leaving the USSR, several works of the writer were published abroad, including "Masking" (1980), "Hand" (1980), "Kangaroo" (1981), "Carousel" (1983), the collection "The Book of Last Words" ( 1984) and Death in Moscow (1985). The action of the works written by Aleshkovsky in exile takes place in the USSR.

In Russia, Aleshkovsky's books began to be officially published in the mid-1990s, the first in 1996 was a collection of his works in three volumes, the introductory word to him was written by Joseph Brodsky, and the afterword by Andrey Bitov.

In 1995, Aleshkovsky recorded in the United States, together with musician Andrei Makarevich, the album "Kurochek".

In 2001, the writer became a laureate of the Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Tepfer Foundation in Hamburg “for the work created by the writer since the 50s, which made him one of the leading personalities of Russian literature of the XNUMXth century.” In the same year, Aleshkovsky signed a collective letter in support of the NTV channel, which had undergone reform.

In 2011, Aleshkovsky’s “Little Prison Novel” took first place in the “large prose” category of the international literary competition for Russian-speaking writers from around the world “Russian Prize”.

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Aleshkovsky has a son from his first marriage - screenwriter and journalist Alexei Aleshkovsky. The nephew of Yuz Aleshkovsky, the writer Pyotr Aleshkovsky, became the laureate of the Russian Booker Prize in 2016.

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