Biography
Postmodernism and Soviet literature - two incompatible things. It is not surprising that the debut novel Sasha Sokolov in the 1970s was not found in the homeland. However, the talent and the identity of the author could not be denyed, no wonder his manuscripts were distributed through samizdat and were eagerly published abroad with enthusiastic reviews of such masters as Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky.Childhood and youth
The mysterious and closed writer boasts not the most banal biography, which in itself pulls on the novel. It is worth starting with the fact that Sasha was born in Canada in the family of real spies. Parents lived in Ottawa under the Soviet embassy. Father Vsevolod Sergeevich, former Frontovik, Commander of the Tank Battalion, held the official post of military attache, but performed a secret task for obtaining the drawings of the atomic bomb. Lydia Vasilyevna's mother served connected.
When the child turned 3 years old, Sokolov, fulfilling the commission entrusted to them, fled to the Soviet Union. By that time, Sasha had not yet spoken, and everyone thought that the boy was dumb. He explained it by the fact that he was constantly hearding the speech in 3 languages - Russian, English and French and just chose, on which one to speak. The first interlocutor became sister Lyudmila, who was older brother for 5 years.
In the school years, falcons bloomed, using success in peers. He was free and fearless, allowing himself fun and even bold tricks who loved his teachers descended on the brakes. And classmates read it with his verses and admired funny things that he fought. Although they did not always look harmless: he could embrace the dead, for example, jokingly to hang.
In 1962, the young man became a student of the Military Institute of Foreign Languages, which threw 3 years later. I walked around the need for service in the army, which the future writer escaped the original way: I traveled to the crazy and 3 months spent in a psychiatric clinic. By the time he was already attempting to escape abroad, for which he served in prison and came out only thanks to his father's relations.
In the late 1960s, Sasha began to cooperate with the Soviet periodic, publishing there essays, articles and stories. In 1969, officially settled in the "Literary Russia" as a correspondent, in parallel, continuing his studies at the Moscow State University, where he entered in 1967.
Going to the correspondence department, the young man went to Mari El, where he worked in the village newspaper "Kolkhoznaya Pravda". The guy was sure that it would rather come to this prose. However, journalism, the list of professions of Sasha is not exhausted. In the youth of Sokolov managed to work with hunts and the stroke, before leaving the country in 1975.
When the writer came to the Austria embassy before leaving, he was reported that the parents and sisters came to the KGB to officially refuse him. After that, Sokolov did not support any connections with his family. The author himself explains this by what he did not want to deliver his native trouble. Sokolov does not even know the details of the death of the father and the mother, who died in 2000, presumably ending with them.
At first, the prose immigrated to Austria, from where in 1976 he moved to the United States, and by followed by Canada, whose citizenship was received in 1977. The first years of emigration were a heavy test for the writer: in Vienna Sokolov managed to work for a logger and a joiner on a furniture factory, and after the ocean already engaged in creativity, in parallel lectures at the universities of North America.
Books
The first Roman Sasha Sokolova "School for Fools" was written back in Russia, but for the first time was published in the United States in 1976. Progressive Russian readers got acquainted with manuscript through samizdat. Hoping that the flow of the consciousness of the hero suffering from the split personality can be published in the USSR, it makes sense. However, this happened in 1990, when a writer has already lived over the ocean for many years, and his homeland passed the path of restructuring and ripened to a new word in the literature.By the time of Sokolov, two more works wrote, with the time of the cultivated, - "between the dog and the wolf" (1980) and "Palisandria" (1985). For the author's novels, neglect of the traditional time and plotty, however, a clearly traced loyalty to the genre of Russian literary classics is clearly traced. They combine surrealism and Christian worldview, phantasmagoria and understanding the problems of society.
Poet Bakhyt Kenegeev in an interview with the "poster Daily" said that he met prose Sokolov long before the meeting with the author himself. Once in Moscow, Kenezhev gave the blind Samsdat copy of the story "between the dog and the Wolf". At first, the poet did not reach the book, then he read the story, without giving it much importance. Then a friend asked to return the book. Bakhyt was a pity to part with the work, he decided to look into it once again. I read the second time, then the third, fourth and fifth:
"I began to squeeze from admiration and crazy envy! In this book, Sasha describes the Soviet life in the style of the Soviet life of 1947 or 1948, it feels completely accurately. "For many years, the writer's bibliography was replenished only by rare articles and essays. In 1985, he wrote an essay about Velimira Khlebnikov to the 100th anniversary of his birth: "In this fate, the problem" artist and society "has affected everything insoluability. Art is a means of knowing non-evimed paths. The artist who was doomed to the wanderings on them is Agasfer. He is a lively and stray hieroglyph question. "
In 2000, they saw the light of the poem "reasoning", "Gazino" and "Philornit". For the current time, the last work of the author was the story "Illumination", published in 2014.
The writer lives for many years in Canada, and in Russia for the last time he came in 1996. Nevertheless, it is open to compatriots and gives them an interview, showing a photo and talking about creativity, biographies and personal life.
The big film about the author came out in 2017 on the air of the First Channel and was called "Sasha Sokolov. The last Russian writer. " The clock tape of Ilya Belova is an attempt to tell about a significant and mysterious writer, which has become a classic postmodernism while life.
A man says that "his head is completely Russian," while not thinking to move from Canada, considering it an ideal country for life. And for death, because it wants to die here.
Personal life
With the first wife of Taisia, the Suvorova Writer met on Zhurfak MSU. A talented girl moved from Moscow to the village, where the beloved worked by Eger, and there she gave birth in fairly extreme conditions to Alexander in 1974. The young people lived together shortly, already in 1975 Sasha makes a decision to leave the USSR, which the second spouse is helps - Austrian Johanna Standl.
They met all in the same MGU, where the woman taught German. In protest against the fact that Sokolov is not produced from the country, Johanna arranged a demonstrative dry hunger strike in Vienna, as a result of which the writer's requirements were satisfied. This marriage lasted long, because, in fact, he was a fictitious, or "sports", as Sasha calls him. Nevertheless, after moving to the United States, two children were born in the USA - Son and Daughter. Here in 1988 the writer made a personal life for the third time, marrying Marlin Royl on an American, which lives now.
Colleagues admire Sokolov, but they recognize that he has a very difficult character, and it is almost impossible to be friends with it. In the era of "Instagram" he does not seek publicity, living in his own rhythm.
Sasha Sokolov Now
At the time of the release of the film "Sasha Sokolov. The last Russian writer "" School for fools "was published only once with a circulation of 5 thousand copies. After the premiere, the book was reprinted and turned out to be in second place in popularity in Russia. The writer was remembered, and his work received a new wave of interest. In the last Russian editions of the cover of the author's books adorn his photo.In 2020, they began talking about the fact that Sasha Sokolov was put forward by a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. The award eventually won the American poetess Louise Glitch. And the very fact of the nomination of Sokolov remains a mystery, because information about applicants for this award is subject to non-disclosure for 50 years.
Bibliography
- 1976 - "School for Fools"
- 1980 - "Between Dog and Wolf"
- 1985 - "Palisandria"
- 2007 - "reasoning"
- 2009 - "Gazino"
- 2010 - "Philornit"
- 2014 - "Illumination"