Vassily Aksyonov dies

The "anti-Soviet Russian" author of 23 novels, who in 1980 was stripped of his Soviet citizenship and spent much of the past three decades in the United States and France, died at 76 on June 6, following a heart attack in Moscow.

Vassily Aksyonov's novels include The Burn and In Search of Melancholy Baby. Publishers Weekly called his wartime saga Generations of Winter "nothing less than a War and Peace for the twentieth century" and compared the novelist to John Dos Passos and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. His Voltairiens and Voltairiennes (Voltairian Men and Women) won the Russian Booker Prize in 2004.

Aksyonov was forced into exile in 1980 when his manuscript for The Burn was discovered by the KGB. He taught Russian literature at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, when his citizenship was reinstated. His absence from his country had troubled him, but following the collapse of the USSR his once controversial works received newfound fame. In 2004, Generations of Winter was adapted into a television miniseries.

Aksyonov had been ill for some eighteen months.

On July 6, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said, "His death is an enormous, irreplaceable loss for Russian literature and culture."

His funeral will be held on July 9.