Three Books: Winter In the Country / On The Death of Ivan Illych / An Atomic Cake

In the first book, Winter in the Country, Azarov imagines the enormous presence of the great poet, Pushkin, and his influence on the development of the modern Russian psyche. In On The Death of Ivan Ilyich he imagines himself exchanging personalities with Tolstoy’s great character, Ivan Ilyich, who suffered and died from a terminal illness. In doing so, he enlarges his own personal experience by giving the death of a close friend a mythic dimension. In the third book, An Atomic Cake, he explores a Moscow world of wild contradictions, surreal social hysteria, and periods of massive malaise, all occurring under the cloud of atomic bomb testing. This is when he met a passionate computer specialist whose father had witnessed the American atomic testing at Bikini Atoll. Together, trying to make sense of such a world, they talked, imagining into existence the spirit of Rita Hayworth as she rode on the side of the bomb in her negligee.