The Modern Novel

Biography

Sasha Sokolov was born in 1943 in Ottawa, where his father was working in the Soviet Embassy. The family returned to Moscow three years later. After high school, he worked as a morgue attendant and then a lathe operator before enrolling in the Military Institute of Foreign Languages. He studied English and Spanish but did not graduate. He then studied journalism at Moscow State University. He wrote Школа для дураков (A School for Fools) after graduating and while working as a game warden. His second wife, an Austrian, smuggled the text out to the West. Sokolov was only allowed to leave the Soviet Union when he went on hunger strike. He moved to Canada and took Canadian citizenship. He has continued to write but has declined to publish much of his work.

Other links

Sasha Sokolov
Sasha Sokolov
Соколов, Александр Всеволодович (in Russian)