Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov (russian: Андре́й Гео́ргиевич Би́тов, 27 May 1937 – 3 December 2018) was a prominent
Russian writer of
Circassian ancestry.
Biography
Bitov was born in
Leningrad
Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...
. His father was an architect and his mother was a lawyer. He completed his secondary education in 1954 and began writing two years later. In 1957, he became a student at the
Leningrad Mining Institute
Saint Petersburg Mining University (russian: Санкт-Петербургский горный университет), is Russia's oldest technical university, and one of the oldest technical colleges in Europe. It was founded on October 21, ...
. While there, he joined a literary association for young writers led by . He also served with a in the north and graduated in 1962.
He then began writing poetry and short, absurdist stories which were not published until the 1990s. In 1965, he became a member of the
Union of Soviet Writers
The Union of Soviet Writers, USSR Union of Writers, or Soviet Union of Writers (russian: Союз писателей СССР, translit=Soyuz Sovetstikh Pisatelei) was a creative union of professional writers in the Soviet Union. It was founded ...
. By 1978, he had published ten works, but his now best known work, ''Pushkin House'', had to be published in the United States and did not appear in the USSR until two years after the beginning of
Perestroika.
In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Russian
PEN Club
PEN International (known as International PEN until 2010) is a worldwide association of writers, founded in London in 1921 to promote friendship and intellectual co-operation among writers everywhere. The association has autonomous Internation ...
and was its President beginning in 1991. He also taught at the
Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.
He received an award from ''
Oktyabr magazine'' for his story ''Something with love...'' in 2013.
The Oktyabr magazine the Writer Andrey Bitov will award Andrey Bitov and Leonid Heifetz
''Ru paper''. 25 December 2013. Retrieved 31 December 2013. This was followed in 2014 by the for culture and, in 2015, he was awarded the Platonov Prize. In 2018, he received the Order of Friendship
The Order of Friendship (russian: Орден Дружбы, ') is a state decoration of the Russian Federation established by Boris Yeltsin by presidential decree 442 of 2 March 1994 to reward Russian and foreign nationals whose work, deeds ...
. He died in Moscow
Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...
.
English Translations
*''Life in Windy Weather: Short Stories'', Ardis, 1986.
*''Pushkin House'', Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987 & Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.
*''A Captive of the Caucasus'', HarperCollins, 1994.
*''Ten Short Stories'', Raduga Publishers
Raduga Publishers (russian: радуга, English: "rainbow") was a Soviet publishing house of innovative children's books, which has been described as "one of the most important book publishers of its type" during the early twentieth century.And ...
, 1995.
*''The Monkey Link'', Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
*''The Symmetry Teacher'', Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
See also
* List of notable 20th-century writers
* Russian literature
References
Secondary literature
* Sven Spieker: Figures of Memory and Forgetting in Andrej Bitov's Prose. Postmodernism and the Quest for History. (= Slawische Literaturen) Frankfurt: PeterLang, 1995, .
* Ellen Chances: ''Andrei Bitov: The Ecology of Inspiration'' (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature), Cambridge UP, 2006,
External links
*
''Palace without a Tsar''
*
The Baggage of Writer Andrei Bitov
*
*
Andrei Bitov's Translingual Novel ''The Symmetry Teacher'', by Ian Singleton
*
1937 births
2018 deaths
Writers from Saint Petersburg
Soviet novelists
Soviet male writers
20th-century Russian male writers
Russian male novelists
Russian male short story writers
Soviet short story writers
20th-century Russian short story writers
Pushkin Prize winners
High Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors alumni
Honorary Members of the Russian Academy of Arts
Circassian people of Russia
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