Fazil' Iskander began his literary career as a poet in the late 1950s but turned to prose soon after; he often appears in lists of notable "young writers" of the 1960s but does not strictly belong with writers such as Vassily Pavlovich Aksyonov, Anatolii Tikhonovich Gladilin, and Vladimir Nikolaevich Voinovich, who took Russian literature in a new direction. Like his contemporaries, Iskander writes short stories of ordinary people in ordinary circumstances, but his gentle humor and subtle, almost oblique, phrasing mask the bite of his satire. His masterpiece, Sandro iz Chegema (Sandro of Chegem, 1977), is a comic, sometimes satiric novel made up of stories of the narrator's legendary Abkhazian uncle, Sandro. This novel, as well as his many stories and novellas guarantee Iskander a place as one of Russia's greatest comic writers.

Fazil' Abdulevich Iskander was born on 6 March 1929 in Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, which at that...