Vassily Aksyonov
Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov (Russian: Василий Павлович Аксёнов, Василий Аксёнов) was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He is known in the West as the author of The Burn (Ожог, Ozhog, from 1975) and Generations of Winter (Московская сага, Moskovskaya Saga, from 1992), a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.
He was the son of Evgenia Ginzburg, jewish russian writer, teacher and survivor of a stalinist gulag.
“Just then Veronika, an attractive woman in a sealskin coat, darted out of the pharmacy, her blue eyes sparkling like signal lights on the yacht of an overthrown monarch.”
Vassily Aksyonov