Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Russian writer.

From 1980 he lived in the United States (where he taught at universities and worked as a radio journalist), and in the last years of his life—in France. In addition to prose and drama in Russian, he wrote screenplays for feature films, was a coauthor of the group adventure novel Giin Green — Untouchable, published one book in English (The Egg Yolk, 1989), and translated from that language.

Early years Vasily Aksyonov was born on 20 August 1932 in Kazan, into a family of Party workers, Evgenia Semyonovna Ginzburg (1904–1977) and Pavel Vasilyevich Aksyonov (1899–1991). He was the third, youngest child in the family (and the only child common to both parents). His father, Pavel Vasilyevich, was chairman of the Kazan City Soviet and a member of the bureau of the Tatar regional Party committee. His mother, Evgenia Semyonovna, worked as a lecturer at the Kazan Pedagogical Institute, then as head of the culture department of the newspaper Krasnaya Tatariya, and was a member of the Kazan regional Party organization. Later, after enduring the horrors of Stalin’s camps, during the time of the exposure of the cult of personality, Evgenia Ginzburg became the author of the memoir book Journey into the Whirlwind, one of the first memoir books about the era of Stalinist repressions and the camps, a story about the eighteen years the author spent in prison, the Kolyma camps, and exile.

In 1937, when V. Aksyonov was not yet five years old, both parents (first his mother, and then shortly afterward his father) were arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison and the camps. The older children—his sister Maya (P. V. Aksyonov’s daughter) and Alyosha (E. S. Ginzburg’s son from her first marriage)—were taken in by relatives. Vasya was forcibly sent to an orphanage for children of prisoners (his grandmothers were