Vassily Aksyonov occupies a distinctive place in the history of Russian literature after the rule of Joseph Stalin. Critics traditionally categorize Aksyonov among the shestidesiatniki--people in 1960s Russia who were in the avant-garde of the new liberal movement and became protesters and dissidents toward the end of the decade. Yet, this definition bothers him. He claims that the period produced different, sometimes opposite, trends in the arts and in culture; the term shestidesiatniki therefore lacks any specific meaning. Another reason why Aksyonov dislikes inclusion in this group is that most of the surviving shestidesiatniki represent a bygone movement completely superfluous in the context of contemporary Russian culture, but such irrelevance is not the case with Aksyonov and his work.

In the more than forty years of his writing career Aksyonov has not ceased looking for new ways to expand his artistic horizons. He started as a troubadour...