Vassily Pavlovich Aksyonov (uhk-SYUH-nuhv) was the leading figure among those Soviet writers who came of age following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. The writers of the new generation dreamed of turning their country away from the nightmare of Stalinism toward a new future—socialism with a human face. Literature became the herald and beacon for the young generation, and Aksyonov as the controversial leader of the “young prose” movement became its spokesman and chronicler.

Aksyonov’s parents, both committed Communists, were falsely arrested as “enemies of the people” in 1937. Aksyonov rejoined his freed mother and stepfather, a Catholic doctor-prisoner, in Siberia at age seventeen. Because “it’s easier for doctors in the camps,” it was decided that Aksyonov would attend medical school in Leningrad, from which he graduated in 1956. Taking advantage of the “thaw,” the young doctor began to write. With the success of his first novel, Colleagues, Aksyonov turned to full-time writing. He became a major figure on the cultural scene with A Ticket to the Stars, a landmark book that served as the rallying point for the new generation. Soviet readers were not accustomed to sympathetic accounts of youthful alienation and were shocked by the book’s language and its young heroes’ irreverent attitude toward authority. In March, 1963, Nikita Khrushchev called a meeting of Soviet writers at which he half-cajolingly, half-threateningly castigated Aksyonov and his colleagues.

Throughout the rest of the 1960’s, Aksyonov succeeded in publishing only two further novels. His many short stories were even more popular: The most famous was “Halfway to the Moon” (1963); the best was “Victory” (1965). As publication became more difficult, Aksyonov turned to the theater, which he saw as a forum for social satire. Between 1963 and 1968 he wrote four plays, but only one, Vsegda v prodazhe (always on sale), survived the censor before it too was banned in 1972. Aksyonov also worked on a number of film scripts.

The Steel Bird, written in 1965 but first published more than a decade later in the United States, marks a crucial turning point for Aksyonov both stylistically and thematically. The earlier writings had remained within the limits of realism, and their optimistic themes were more social than political. The Steel Bird is a modernist political allegory warning of the return of Stalinism. The major work of the 1970’s was The Burn, written between 1969 and 1975 but published, again only in the West, in 1980. The long, complex novel is an indictment of the Russian intelligentsia for its moral collapse before the resurgent (if milder) Stalinism of the mid-1960’s.

Aksyonov was permitted to accept a one-term appointment as Regents’ Lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1975. The experience is reflected in his second major novel of the 1970’s, The Island of Crimea, a futuristic fantasy in which Crimea has become an independent capitalist supercivilization reminiscent of Southern California. The novel is also Aksyonov’s most bitter indictment of the Soviet Union, for after the free Crimeans’ vote for reunification with Mother Russia, that country, unable to grasp the idea, invades. During the late 1970’s, Aksyonov and a number of his colleagues boldly undertook to publish Metropol, an uncensored literary anthology. Strong government pressure was brought to bear upon the contributors. Aksyonov resigned from the Writers’ Union in protest and was, in effect, forced to emigrate. In the months before his emigration, Aksyonov wrote his best play, The Heron, which he dedicated to his Metropol friends. The heron, a symbol of freedom, is killed at the end of the play, although there is...