Vasily Aksyonov Critical Essay | Critical Review by Richard Eder

SOURCE: A review of In Search of Melancholy Baby, in Los Angeles Times Book Review, June 28, 1987, pp. 3, 7.

In the following review, Eder discusses the shortcomings of Aksyonov's book In Search of Melancholy Baby.

Vassily Aksyonov, whose novel, The Burn, is one of the masterpieces of dissident Soviet literature, has been living in this country for the last half-dozen years. He is not really qualified to write about the United States. He is marvelously well qualified to write about himself in the United States.

In Search of Melancholy Baby does too much of the first and too little of the second. It takes a long time for an emigre to arrive; particularly, an emigre writer. The flowers are different, Josef Brodsky once pointed out; and more important, the words for the flowers are different.

Aksyonov is getting here, as we can see from the mordant and singularly...
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