Efimov Igor Markovich, writer: biography and creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The writer I. M. Efimov has been living in America since 1975. His works - both in style, and in semantic saturation, and in texture - are high-quality prose that has absorbed international literary traditions. The name of this author is little known to Russian-speaking readers, but those who got acquainted with the books of Igor Markovich note that the philosophy of life, a fascinating plot and the events described are intertwined in his novels.

About the author

I. M. Efimov was born in 1937 in the family of a diplomat who was shot in the late 30s. In the conditions of the atmosphere that surrounded him from childhood as the son of an “enemy of the people”, in the evacuation and post-war Leningrad, he had to defend his free will, which was pressured both in the Stalinist gymnasium and in St. Petersburg gateways. These facts from the biography are reflected in his novel “Like One Flesh”.

In 1960 he graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and in 1973 from the Literary Institute. He made his debut as a writer in 1965 with the story "Look who's come!", based on reality,surrounding him, a turbine engineer. According to Igor Efimov, at that time he managed to print only children's works. Of course, he took on adult topics, but he constantly caught himself thinking that the pen was diligently bypassing reality. The feeling of stealing from oneself made me send my work to Western publications under the pseudonym Andrey Moskovit.

Emigration

In the 60-70s, writers became the object of persecution by the authorities. Chukovskaya and Voinovich were expelled from the Writers' Union. Solzhenitsyn was taken to Lefortovo and declared a traitor to the Motherland. In 1978 Efimov emigrated to America. He told about the years spent in the USSR in the first volume of his memoirs “The Link of Times”, in the second he spoke about life in America. In the USA, the writer was invited to the Ardis publishing house, and his wife became an employee of Radio Liberty. In America, Efimov published eight novels written back in Russia.

Memories

In 2005, Igor Yefimov's memoirs about Brodsky, "The Nobel Parasite", came out. The book about Dovlatov caused a sensation. The release of "Epistolary Novel" (2001) is associated with a scandal - Dovlatov's letters were published without the consent of his wife, and the publishing house paid a huge fine. The two volumes of memoirs “Link of Times” (2011) are incredibly valuable autobiographical books with hundreds of famous names and details.

Children's books

The adventure story “Snowstorm over the House of Cards” introduces readers to little heroes who went home from school, and on their waya blizzard struck. Seeing traces of a tractor in the snow, they happily walked along the track. The work with elements of science fiction is written very realistically, the author managed to snatch the most important things from bygone days and pour them onto the pages of the book. The telephone operators tried to contact the forester's house, not far from the scientific laboratory, but they heard only the howl of a dog and shots. That's where the guys got in. Entering the building where the laboratory was located, they found people unconscious. What happened here?

“The Tauride Garden” by Igor Efimov is a funny touching story that tells about post-war Leningrad. Everything here is reminiscent of the war: residents returning from evacuation; captured Germans building houses; girls playing “grocery queue”; boys watching the prisoners with distrust. The stories “I want to go to Siverskaya” and “Explosions in the classroom” also tell about the life of boys in the 50s. Many authors write about post-war Leningrad. As expected, in their books there is a lot of fear, deprivation, hunger, but in the works of Efimov, little heroes live a child's life - they get to know each other, make friends, go to camp, participate in olympiads. There is not enough food, no clothes and shelter, but life does not stand still.

Historical novels

The first work written in this genre was Igor Efimov's novel "Toppl every yoke", which tells about the fate of one of the leaders of the English revolution - John Lilburn. His life is both a feat and a tragedy of a man who was ahead of his time. The author managed to show the relationshipspouses Lilburn, to emphasize that it is not duty, but only love that makes a wife follow her husband, support him in everything, abandon relatives, live in poverty and sacrifice herself.

In the novel "The Emperor's Bride" we are talking about the decline of Ancient Rome, about the rulers, about the barbarians who captured the thousand-year-old Rome, about the fate and teachings of Pelagius the Briton. Events and people come to life here, foreshadowing the decline of the Roman Empire. Everything was intertwined - Christians, ready to whip their brother not only on both cheeks, but also burn, persecute, beat; barbarians calling on their gods and offering human sacrifices. In this confusion, a new world was born, people lived, studied and searched for the truth.

Action fiction

“Unfaithful” is a novel based on the emotional experiences of a woman for whom infidelity is simply a “lifestyle”. Writer Igor Efimov shows what kind of dead end such behavior can lead to, and the story gradually turns from a leisurely novella into an action-packed thriller. The heroine-philologist writes letters to famous writers and poets, each of them has his own, unique situation, when infidelity drove them into a corner. The book is not only fascinating, but also informative, as it replenishes the piggy bank “from the life of the great.”

The novel “Archives of the Last Judgment” (1982) is an action-packed work. This is a detective, and an adventure novel, and an action movie. Not only a genre cocktail, but also geographical - Paris, Moscow, Tallinn, Boston; motley characters - terrorists, geologists, scientists, mafiosi, KGB officers. Everything is connected by different feelings -hatred, love, suspicions, but most importantly - the hope of resurrection, faith in the recipe for immortality. The work is written in beautiful language, there are magnificent metaphors and a story told with meaning.

“The Seventh Wife” is a stunning action-packed novel released in 1990. The saturation of events and the author's wisely ironic reasoning about the psychology of the relationship between a man and a woman turn the work into a fusion of genres - philosophical and adventure. The hero of the book was married several times, as a decent man got married, had children and … left the family. The daughter from her first marriage left for the Inverted Country (Soviet Union), and her father went in search of her. The author surprisingly managed to show both the Soviet and foreign worlds. How a person, once in the Union, changes his views, speech, his life.

“New Babylon”

Igor Efimov's novel "Court and Case" (2001) in a sense "picks up" and develops the main theme of "The Seventh Wife", also describing the leapfrog of love and parting. But if the hero of "The Seventh Wife" obeys the rules and obediently goes through the divorce procedure every time, then the hero of the work "Court and Case" falls in love with a married woman who is disappointed in marriage and despairs of finding happiness. Because of her, Keeper, as the name of the hero of the novel, meets with opponents of monogamous marriages, who are looking for new options for arranging a family. The novel ends with the defeat of the protagonist - he loses his beloved, not finding in his soul a response to her anti-monogamoussearching.

If you remove the sub title of the book "Lolita and Hoddleden", the reader will not notice that the author "resurrected" the names of two of the most famous teenagers of the 50s, borrowing them from Nabokov and Salinger. When the novel was published in the magazine, the sub title was lost, and many reviewers overlooked this fact. The work "Court and Case" opens, in chronological order, the tetralogy "New Babylon". The novel is set in the early 1970s. The reader will meet here with characters familiar from The Archives of the Last Judgment (1982) - Leida Rigel and her children.

From the book "The Seventh Wife" (1990), the events of which take the reader to the mid-80s, Golda Sebezh migrated to the novel "Court and Case" (2001). As Igor Markovich Efimov himself says, this cycle would suit the general name "New Babylon", since this tetralogy is united by one theme, deep and requiring everyone's attention - the conflict of loy alty and love. The events of the last novel "The Accused" (2009) take place in 2001, and on its pages the reader will meet the characters mentioned in all the previously listed works.

Philosophical works

The philosophical nature of prose was noted by all critics who wrote about the work of Igor Markovich. One of these works was "Practical Metaphysics", published excerpts in the journal "Frontiers" in 1973. A separate book was published in 1980 under the authorship of Andrei Moskovit. As befits philosophical treatises, it raisesthe eternal problem is the comprehension of the mystery of being. “Practical Metaphysics” is not a set of verbal combinations, but an example of a deep and conscientious approach to the problem. The author did not say anything fundamentally new, but critics attributed this work to professional philosophy: carefully calibrated terminology, well-formed sentences, individual episodes with their imagery deliver aesthetic pleasure.

In Igor Efimov's book "The Shameful Secret of Inequality" (1999), the author shows that people have different degrees of talent and constantly compete in the application of their abilities. But it is not customary to talk about it. The slogans of all major uprisings and revolutions called for equality. Take the same communist system. It would seem that estates, property inequality were destroyed, an ideal social order was achieved, but in the midst of this triumph in the 30s, a terrible Stalinist terror broke out. Why did this happen? The author is looking for an answer to the question of why the intellectual and industrial elite was destroyed, and this happened not only in Russia and China, but also in other communist countries.

It is difficult to define the genre of the book “Without Bourgeois”, published in 1979 under the pseudonym of Andrey Moskovit. For a textbook, this work is too exciting, and it does not look like notes on agriculture, as it is too strictly documented. The work of Igor Efimov is true, the author gives many examples of the inefficiency of the planned economy, while he does not refer to the Stalinist period, because in this case it will be necessary to answer the question of why the system that workedunder Stalin, stopped working under Khrushchev.

Other works

• Collection of articles “The Burden of Good” (1993).
• “Double Portraits” - a collection of articles published in 2003.
• The novel “Spectacles” was released in 1967 in a samizdat way, gradually, by the efforts of the censors, it was shredded, and, according to the author, only fragments remained from the work.
• “Who killed President Kennedy?” (1991) - the writer did a great job with numerous sources and, it would seem, proved that Cuban intelligence was behind the assassination of the president.
• Historical novel "Novgorod interpreter", published in 2004.