Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov (Russian: Андре́й Гео́ргиевич Би́тов), born on May 27, 1937, and died on December 3, 2018, was a well-known Russian writer. He had Circassian ancestry.

Biography

Bitov was born in Leningrad. His father was an architect, and his mother was a lawyer. He finished high school in 1954 and began writing in 1956. In 1957, he became a student at the Leningrad Mining Institute. While there, he joined a group for young writers led by Gleb Semyonov. He also served in a building battalion in the north and graduated in 1962.

After graduating, he started writing poetry and short, strange stories. These works 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. However, his most famous book, Pushkin House, was first published in the United States and did not appear in the USSR until two years after Perestroika began.

In 1988, he helped start the Russian PEN Club and became its president in 1991. He also taught at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. In 2013, he received an award from Oktyabr for his story Something with Love…. In 2014, he was honored with the Government Award of the Russian Federation for culture. In 2015, he won the Platonov Prize. In 2018, he received the Order of Friendship. He died in Moscow in 2018.

English translations

• Life in Windy Weather: Short Stories, Ardis, 1986.
• Pushkin House, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1987 & Dalkey Archive Press, 1998.
• A Captive of the Caucasus, HarperCollins, 1994.
• Ten Short Stories, Raduga Publishers, 1995.
• The Monkey Link, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• The Symmetry Teacher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.

Secondary literature

• Sven Spieker: Memory and Forgetting in Andrei Bitov's Writing. Postmodernism and the Search for History. (= Slawische Literaturen) Frankfurt: PeterLang, 1995, ISBN 978-3-631-46940-8.
• Ellen Chances: Andrei Bitov: The Ecology of Inspiration (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature), Cambridge UP, 2006, ISBN 0-521-02527-3.