Andrei Bitov

Andrei Bitov
Native name	Андрей Георгиевич Битов
Born	(1937-05-27) May 27, 1937 Leningrad, USSR
Occupation	novelist
Nationality	Russian
Genre	Postmodern literature

Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov (Russian: Андре́й Гео́ргиевич Би́тов, born Leningrad, 27 May 1937) is a prominent Russian writer of Circassian ancestry.

Biography

His father was an architect and his mother was a lawyer. He completed his secondary education in 1954 and began writing two years later. In 1957, he became a student at the Leningrad Mining Institute. While there, he joined a literary association for young writers led by Gleb Semyonov. He also served with a building battalion in the north and graduated in 1962.

He then began writing poetry and short, absurdist stories which were not published until the 1990s. In 1965, he became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers. By 1978, he had published ten works, but his now best known work, Pushkin House, had to be published in the United States and did not appear in the USSR until two years after the beginning of Perestroika.

In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Russian PEN Club and has been its President since 1991. He has also taught at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

He received an award from Oktyabr magazine for his story Something with love... in 2013. This was followed in 2014 by the Government Award of the Russian Federation for cultute and, in 2015, he was awarded the Platonov Prize. In 2018, he received the Order of Friendship.

English Translations

• Life in Windy Weather: Short Stories, Ardis, 1986.
• A Captive of the Caucasus, HarperCollins, 1994.
• Ten Short Stories, Raduga Publishers, 1995.
• Pushkin House, Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.
• The Monkey Link, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• The Symmetry Teacher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

See also

• List of notable 20th-century writers
• Russian literature

Secondary literature

• Ellen Chances: Andrei Bitov: The Ecology of Inspiration (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature), Cambridge UP, 2006, ISBN 0-521-02527-3

External links

• Template:Ru icon Palace without a Tsar
• Template:En icon The Baggage of Writer Andrei Bitov
• Template:Ru icon Biography
• Template:En icon Andrei Bitov's Translingual Novel The Symmetry Teacher, by Ian Singleton