Andrey Arev

Andrey Yuryevich Aryev is a Soviet and Russian literary scholar, literary critic, and prose writer.

In 1964, he graduated from the Department of Russian Language and Literature at the Faculty of Philology of Leningrad State University. After graduating from the university, he worked at the Northwestern Publishing House (Arkhangelsk), then at Lenizdat. He took part in expeditions to Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands, and Tajikistan. For some time he led tours at the Mikhailovskoye museum-reserve. He then began working for the magazine Zvezda, serving as a consultant in the prose department and as deputy editor-in-chief. Since 1972, he has published his own prose works, both in the Soviet periodical press and in samizdat and abroad. Since 1984, he has been a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR. He has published as a literary scholar and literary critic in various periodicals such as Voprosy Literatury, Zvezda, Znamya, Novy Mir, and many others. He is the author of more than 200 published works. His area of interest is Russian culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Since 1991 (according to other sources, since 1992), together with Yakov Gordin, he has been co-editor of the magazine Zvezda.

In 2000, he published the collection of critical essays Tsarskaya Vetka. He was the compiler of Sergei Dovlatov’s collected works and a commentator on his writings; he was on friendly terms with Dovlatov and published memoirs about him. He is the author of a number of articles on the work of Vladimir Nabokov. He is the author of the book The Life of Georgy Ivanov. A Documentary Narrative. He is a member of the jury for the Northern Palmyra Prize. He lives in Saint Petersburg.

Philologist, journalist, and Radio Liberty employee Ivan Tolstoy characterized Aryev as “a steadfast admirer of the Petersburg type of culture.”