The Modern Novel

Biography

Gaito Gazdanov was born in Saint Petersburg in 1903 but the family moved to Siberia when he was four. During the Civil War, he fought with Wrangel and the Whites in order, as he later said, to know what war is. When the Whites retreated, they went to Turkey and it was in Constantinople where he wrote his first story. He then moved to Bulgaria, where he continued his education and, finally, to Paris, where he spent most of his life. He worked at various odd jobs and even slept rough, though he managed to study at the Sorbonne. His first novel Вечер у Клэр (An Evening with Claire) was published in 1929 and received good reviews. However, till the success of Призрак Александра Вольфа (The Spectre of Alexander Wolf), he had to continue working as a taxi driver. During the war, he was part of a resistance group created by Soviet prisoners. He later moved to Munich to work for Radio Liberty. He died in 1971. His work was never published in the Soviet Union and he was virtually unknown in Russia, till his work was published in the 1990s.

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Gaito Gazdanov
Gaito Gazdanov