SOURCE: "He Likes It Here, Mostly," in The New York Times Book Review, July 19, 1987, p. 5.

In the following review, Lingeman comments on Aksyonov's In Search of Melancholy Baby, noting that the book, an account of Aksyonov's life in America after his expulsion from the Soviet Union, provides many witty and satirical insights into life in both countries.

In 1980, after his novel of life among the Moscow culturati, The Burn, was published in Italy, Vassily Aksyonov was expelled from the Soviet Union. Now he is an outspoken skeptic about glasnost in the Russian literary diaspora. The Burn is written in a brilliantly subversive style, stuffed with satire, surrealism, anarchic Henry Milleresque bawdiness, and thrown in the face of Soviet realism.

His latest book, In Search of Melancholy Baby, an account of his new life in America, will earn its author no rehabilitative points with the Ministry of Culture. Actually...