SOURCE: "Counterrevolutionary Families Are All the Same," in New York Times Book Review, July 17, 1994, p. 6.

In the review of Generations of Winter below, Parini, an educator, poet, and novelist, compares Aksyonov to Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, lauding Aksyonov's "deft historical scholarship."

Vassily Aksyonov is the most widely admired Russian novelist of his generation. A physician by training, he enraged the Soviet literary establishment with his jazzy second novel, Ticket to the Stars (1961), which featured the urbanized, Western-influenced youth of the day. Defying censorship at every turn, he produced a blistering sequence of novels and plays during the next two decades; in 1979, he was among the group that published a dissident anthology, Metropol, in a symbolic edition of one. The next year, with the appearance of his novel The Burn—a brilliant, surreal fantasia on Soviet life—he was forced to emigrate.

In exile in the United States...