Prominent Russian novelist Vasily Aksyonov died in Moscow on Monday - July 6, 2009, at the age of 76, his doctor said.

He was in a grave condition in a Moscow clinic after a car crash. He died on Monday afternoon, Vladimir Naidin said.
Aksyonov, born in 1932, is best known in the West as the author of The Burn, Oranges from Morocco, The Island of Crimea and Generations of Winter (Moscow Saga).
His mother was a successful journalist and educator and his father Pavel Aksyonov had a high position in the administration of Kazan. Both of them were faithful communists. In 1937 Yevgenia Ginzburg was arrested and tried for her alleged connection to Trotskyists. She was sentenced to 10 years of solitary confinement in prison (later added 10 years of forced labour in the Gulag). She served a total of 18 years there, gaining release in 1955. Vasily's father Pavel was arrested soon afterwards for a similar crime and was sentenced to 15 years of corrective labour.
He was raised in an orphanage. He graduated from the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Medical Institute in 1956 and worked as a doctor for the next three years.
His first stories were published in 1958 in the popular Yunost (Youth) magazine.
In the 1970s, after the end of the Khrushchev Thaw, Aksyonov's work was kept from publication by Soviet censors.
In 1979, Aksyonov, along with Andrei Bitov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Fazil Iskander and Bella Akhmadulina published the journal Metropol, which featured works that did not receive official permission to appear.
In 1980, Aksyonov and his wife traveled to the United States and were stripped of Soviet citizenship.
The writer lived in the U.S. until 2004 and taught Russian literature at American universities
Aksyonov's books have been translated into many languages. He won the Russian Booker Prize in 2004 for his novel Voltairiens and Voltairiennes.

President Dmitry Medvedev has sent his condolences to Aksyonov's family, the Kremlin press service said.



informations taken from the central press