Pavel Basinsky

Pavel Valeryevich Basinsky is a Russian writer, literary scholar, and literary critic.

He is the author of bestselling biographical books Leo Tolstoy: Flight from Paradise (Big Book Award), The Passions of Maxim. Gorky, Look at Me. The Secret History of Liza Dyakonova, The Lion in the Shadow of Leo, and The Saint Against the Lion. Leo Tolstoy and John of Kronstadt.

He is a recipient of the Russian Government Prize in Culture (2014). He is a member of the jury of the Yasnaya Polyana literary prize, a member of the Union of Russian Writers (1993), and an academician of the Academy of Modern Russian Literature (1997). He serves on the permanent jury of the A. Solzhenitsyn Prize (1997).

He studied in the foreign languages department of Saratov University, graduated from the A. M. Gorky Literary Institute (1986; criticism seminar led by V. A. Surganov) and its postgraduate program, and defended his candidate’s dissertation on the topic “Gorky and Nietzsche.” He has worked at the Literary Institute (1986–95 and since 2010).

Since 1981, he has been published as a critic in Literaturnaya Gazeta and in the journals Novy Mir, October, Banner, Friendship of Peoples, Our Contemporary, as well as in the online journal Russian Interweaving. He is the editor of the culture section of Rossiyskaya Gazeta. He is a member of the jury of the Yasnaya Polyana literary prize.

He compiled collections of works by M. Gorky, L. Andreyev, O. Mandelstam, and M. Kuzmin; and the anthologies Village Prose: In 2 vols. (Moscow: Slovo, 2000), Russian Prose of the 1950s–1980s Show full Collapse