Sasha Sokolov Bio
Rose Gotlieb & Anwyn Urquhart
Alexander Vsevolodovitch Sokolov, or “Sasha” Sokolov, is a contemporary Russian author, well-known for his novels A School for Fools, Between Dog and Wolf, and Astrophobia. His writing and life mirrors the conflict and chaos of Russian life in the second half of the 20th century.
Sokolov’s life has been marked by many upheavals, beginning when he fled to Russia three years after his birth in Ottawa in 1943. His parents were Soviet spies trying to uncover information about the atomic bomb in Canada. A fellow Soviet spy, Igor Gouzenko, defected after learning the USSR did not trust him and was sending him back to Russia. Igor exposed the entire Soviet spy network in Canada and America, thus forcing the Sokolovs to flee. Sokolov, unlike his parents, was anti-Soviet from a young age, causing lots of conflict in the Sokolov household. “We were hot-blooded people, like a working-class Italian family in one of Fellini’s movies,” (Remnick, 1989). He found a spiritual ally in his grandfather who was arrested in 1937 as an enemy of the people and was denounced by Sasha's father. Sokolov attempted to leave Russia in 1964, when he tried to cross the border through Iran on foot, but due to the Cold War and strict border restrictions, Sokolov failed.
The young writer joined a group of Russian creatives called SMOG (an acronym for Courage, Thought, Image, and Depth; or, The Youngest Society of Geniuses) in 1965. The group was made up of neo-futurist writers who organized unsanctioned public readings of poetry. Sokolov left the group soon after, unable to keep up with their “monstrous way of life,” as “for months at a time, they did not sober up and simply moved from one dacha to another” (Vaimain, 2006, 369-371), but SMOG made a lasting impression on Sokolov and his future works. He continued to write, and began to study journalism at the Moscow State University. The journalism faculty at MGU allowed students to explore ideas that were normally not permitted in the Soviet Union at the time, as they discussed texts such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn's books. Around the same time, he married his first wife, Taisiia Suvorova. After graduating from MGU in 1971, he moved to a hunting preserve in the Tver region of Russia, where he continued to write while in isolation.
He completed his first book, A School for Fools, in 1973. Following his divorce and the birth of his daughter, Aleksandra, he moved back to Moscow. His soon-to-be second wife, Johanna Steindl, was teaching German at the University of Moscow, and smuggled the text of A School for Fools to the West. In 1975, after a hunger strike on Steindl’s part, he was able to move to Austria and marry her, finally leaving Russia after all. A year later he moved to America. A School for Fools was published in Russian, and then in English translation, by Ardis Publishers. A School for Fools was also traded by Sokolov to Canada for the "Gouzenko Report" which had information about his parents' work in Canada.
He wrote his second novel in 1980, Between Dog and Wolf, inspired by the time he spent at the hunting preserve. It wasn’t translated until 2017, 37 years after being written, due to his creative manipulations of the Russian language. Sokolov uses puns, double negatives, incomplete sentences, and misspellings throughout the novel making translating it a nightmare. In response to the density of Between Dog and Wolf, Sokolov said, “It's difficult, yes, but I felt like I wouldn't be able to write just simple texts. I like dense texts” (NPR, 2017). This isn’t true for all of his books, though. A School for Fools was translated soon after it was published and garnered great success. It didn’t have the same complexity of writing style as Between Dog and Wolf, which was met with relative silence.
Sokolov’s earliest inspiration was Gogol, whom he still states to be his “number-one writer” (Vaimain, 2006, 370-371). He also admires Boris Pasternak, winner of the Nobel Prize and author of Dr. Zhivago. Pasternak is labeled as both a post-symbolist and a futurist. The symbolist movement is characterized by fleeting sensations, metaphors, and an attempt to capture internal experience, whereas the futurist movement encouraged techniques such as analogy and abolition of syntax, and tried to capture dynamism, movement, and other aspects of modern life. Both movements are visible in Sokolov’s writing. Other techniques Sokolov uses, particularly in Between Dog and Wolf, are stream of consciousness, in which thoughts, narrative, and speech are all written together without syntax or even logical coherence; forking characters, a practice inspired by Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” in which characters blend into each other, so they’re not entirely distinct from one another; and skaz, a type of narrative voice characterized by slang.
He wrote his third, most recent novel in 1985, entitled Astrophobia. Soon after, he married his third wife—Marlene Royle, an Olympic rower—and has since spent most of the rest of his life writing essays, giving lectures, and traveling. He’s lived in Israel and now spends most of his time in Florida. Many call him the “Russian Salinger." His triptych of novels, A School for Fools, Between Dog and Wolf, and Astrophobia, have been a major influence on many current Russian authors and are highly valued pieces in Russian literature as a whole.
Bibliography
Remnick, David. 1989. Review of Writer Rediscovers Russian’s Magic : Books: Sasha Sokolov, Author of “School for Fools,” Has Returned to Moscow after a Stormy Exit in 1975. Los Angeles Times. November 9, 1989. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-11-09-vw-1376-story.html.
“Translating The Untranslatable: ‘Between Dog And Wolf.’” n.d. NPR.Org. Accessed September 21, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2017/01/28/512199359/between-dog-and-wolf.
Vaiman, Naum. "A Conversation With Sasha Sokolov (Over The Barrier: A Special Broadcast In Honor Of Sasha Sokolov's 60th Birthday)." Canadian-American Slavic Studies 40, no. 2-4 (2006): 367-78.
