Fazil Iskander

Fazil Iskander (Sukhumi, 1929 – Peredelkino, 2016) was a Soviet and Russian writer of Abkhaz origin, known across the former Soviet Union for his portrayals of life in the Caucasus, written in Russian. His significance lies in giving literary voice to a multi-ethnic corner of the Caucasus in a language that was not the everyday tongue of most of its people, and in combining humour, irony and local memory in work that was widely read throughout the USSR.

Born in Sukhumi, the capital of the Abkhaz Soviet Socialist Republic, he was the son of an Iranian father and an Abkhaz mother. His father was deported to Iran in 1938 and died in a penal camp in 1957. Fazil was only nine at the time and was raised by his mother's Abkhaz family together with his siblings, an experience of uprootedness and village life that shaped much of his outlook.

In the mid-1960s he came to prominence alongside writers of the so-called young prose movement, such as Yuri Kazakov and Vasily Aksyonov. His story The Goatibex Constellation (1966) satirises Lysenko's genetics and Khrushchev's farming campaigns, and was sharply criticised for portraying the Soviet Union in an unflattering light. His best-known work abroad is Sandro of Chegem, a picaresque novel about a village in Abkhazia from the early twentieth century to the 1970s. Written in 1966 and published in 1973, it drew comparisons to Mark Twain and has been considered an example of magic realism, though Iskander said he had little interest in Latin American magic realism. Parts of the novel were adapted into films, the best known being The Feast of Belshazzar, released in 1989.

Late in life he distanced himself from the Abkhaz secessionist movement of the late 1980s, criticised ethnic prejudice among both Georgians and Abkhaz, and warned that Abkhazia could become a second Nagorno-Karabakh. He lived in Moscow, where he wrote for the newspaper Kultura, and died in Peredelkino at the age of 87. His legacy is kept alive in Abkhazia, where a statue of his character Chik was unveiled in 2011, and through prizes such as the Pushkin Prize and the Triumph Prize.