Gazdanov, Gaito (Georgy) Ivanovich — prose writer, literary critic.

He was born on November 23 (December 6, New Style), 1902, in St. Petersburg into a well-to-do family of Ossetian origin, Russian in culture, education, and language. His father’s profession as a forester made the family travel frequently throughout the country, so the future writer spent only his childhood years in St. Petersburg, then lived in various cities in Russia (in Siberia, the Tver province, and elsewhere). He often stayed with relatives in the Caucasus, in Kislovodsk.

His school years were spent in Poltava, where he studied for a year in a cadet corps, and in Kharkov, where he studied at a gymnasium from 1912 onward. He managed to complete seven grades. In 1919, at the age of sixteen, he joined Wrangel’s Volunteer Army and fought in the Crimea. He served on an armored train. When the army retreated, Gazdanov left with it, first to Gallipoli, then to Constantinople. There he happened to meet his cousin, a ballerina who had left before the Revolution and, together with her husband, lived and worked in Constantinople. They helped Gazdanov greatly. He continued his gymnasium studies there in 1922. It was there that his first story, “The Hotel of the Future,” was written. The gymnasium was transferred to the town of Shumen in Bulgaria, where Gazdanov graduated in 1923.

In 1923 he came to Paris, which he did not leave for thirteen years. To earn a living, he had to do any kind of work: as a porter, a locomotive washer, a worker at the Citroën automobile plant, and others. He then worked as a taxi driver for twelve years. During those twelve years, four of his nine novels and twenty-eight of his thirty-seven stories were written; everything else took the following thirty years.

At the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s, he studied for four years at the Sorbonne in the Faculty of History and Philology, focusing on literary history, sociology, and economics. In the spring of 1932