The returnee of Aksenov. Biography of Maya Carmen (Aksyonova) Roman Carmen personal life wife

Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov is a prose writer, from whose pen many short stories, novellas, and trilogies have been published. He wrote many different works that are known to readers, but initially he did not intend to associate himself with writing, but more on that in order.

At first, Vasily Aksenov’s life started well. The child was born in 1932 in Kazan into the family of a party leader, so his family could be called famous, and besides, the parents were intelligent people. Alexey was the third child; before him, his mother and father had children from their first marriages. Alexey is the common child of Pavel and Evgenia. Everything seemed to be going well, but then difficult times came, the times of “Stalin’s purges” and Aksenov’s parents were arrested. The boy himself, unlike the older children who were taken by relatives, was sent to a boarding school. This happened when the boy was four, and only a year later did his uncle manage to find Alexei and take him to his place.
The future writer was able to meet his mother only ten years later in 1948, when she left the camps and moved as an exile to Magadam. There Vasily spent his youth, which he would later describe in his work “The Burn.”

Vasily Aksenov biography and personal life

Further, the life of Vasily Aksenov, his biography and personal life continues with the fact that in 1956 he graduated from a medical university in Leningrad and even worked in his profession for several years, but he saw his greater calling when he first tried to write. And this happened in the early sixties. Then he wrote the story “Colleagues,” which immediately brought success to the writer. This story was even filmed, as were his subsequent works, including the novel “Star Ticket,” and a play based on the play “Always on Sale” was staged. With each subsequent year, the author becomes more popular, he is recognized and read. He was accepted as a member of the editorial board of Yunost. However, the authorities themselves did not entirely accept Aksenov, especially did not support his social activities, and due to his constant participation in demonstrations, Vasily Aksenov’s work began to be criticized, and then he was completely banned from publishing in his native country.

Then the life of Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov and his short biography continues in the USA, where he emigrated. As soon as he arrived in the United States, his homeland immediately deprived him of his citizenship. Due to this exile, the author was unable to visit his country for ten years. During this period in America, he wrote the autobiographical work “Burn”, the trilogy “Moscow Saga” and much more. Works in the USA as a journalist, teaches literature at universities.

His citizenship was returned to him in the nineties, but the writer prefers to live abroad and only comes to his native country on short visits. His first work that was published in our country after a long exile was the work “The Voltairians and the Voltairians.” The writer's last work was the novel "Mysterious Passion".

Vasily Aksenov died in 2009.
If we talk about Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov, his biography and personal life, then it is worth talking about his marital status. He was married twice. From his first marriage he had a child, his son Alexey. His first wife was a girl from a famous family - Kira Mendeleeva, but when Vasily met Maya Carmen, he realized that she was the love of his life. Maya was with him until his last days.

Maya Carmen (Aksenov’s wife) celebrated her 86th birthday on June 5, 2016. In her youth, she was the stubborn, straightforward and purposeful daughter of the Soviet historian A. A. Zmeul, who in the 33rd year of the World War II, and during the Second World War worked as a PUR agitator, then headed the International Book organization.

Youth

Maya Zmeula, being a representative of the “golden youth”, graduated from the capital’s school and foreign trade institute, and worked at the Chamber of Commerce. In contrast to what the daughter of a foreign trade executive who heads a large international organization had, she was left without a mother. Afanasy married for the second time. But the girl did not seek to build a relationship with her stepmother.

In 1951, her first marriage took place with foreign trade worker Maurice Ovchinnikov. Three years later, a daughter, Lena, appeared in the family. But the meeting with the famous director Carmen became fatal. Roman left Nina Orlova after 20 years of marriage.

Possessing a prestigious apartment in a popular high-rise building on Kotelnicheskaya Embankment, a dacha near Moscow, a car with personal drivers, the couple lived in peace and harmony. They could afford expensive travel and hours-long receptions with Politburo members.

But in the 1970s, Carmen was diagnosed with a heart attack. The couple decided to restore their health in Yalta, where Maya met with Vasily Aksenov.

Life with Aksenov

At that time Maya and Vasily met, they were married. This did not stop them from meeting secretly and becoming the subject of public discussion. Maya did not have the right to leave her husband, and Aksyonov did not contradict her will. In 1978, Roman Carmen died, and Maya decided to try her luck with Vasily. This influenced the divorce from his wife Kira. And 2 years later the wedding celebration took place. The event took place in Peredelkino, at the dacha, in the circle of close people.

In July 1980, the family went to France. After 2 months, they visited the USA, where they decided to stay for 2 years. But with the deprivation of citizenship, the writer remained to live abroad for 24 years. Maya and her husband worked as philologists at the university.

In 1999, Carmen lost her grandson Vanya. He broke, falling out of the window. At this time he was 26 years old.

In 2004, the Aksenovs were returned to their seized housing in the capital of the Russian Federation. Four years later, the head of the family had a stroke when he was traveling outside the high-rise building. The man lay in a coma for 2 years. And in 2008, daughter Lena died unexpectedly in her sleep, followed by her stepfather.

In one of the interviews, Carmen admits that she lives for her beloved dog Aksenov, a spaniel with the nickname Pushkin.

Video

Aksenov was seriously ill for a long time. Stroke, intensive care, coma, surgery...

For a long time we had hope. - The writer’s wife Maya Afanasyevna found the strength to talk briefly with us immediately after the difficult news. - On Monday I was in his hospital all day. I arrived home and suddenly they called me - my husband is no more... I need to come to my senses. Because I don't understand at all that this is true...

For more than a year, Vasily Pavlovich was confined to a hospital bed. His stepdaughter Elena (she considered Aksenova to be her father) came to Russia from the USA as soon as she learned about the disaster. For almost six months she nursed Vasily Pavlovich in the clinic of the Institute. Burdenko. And in August 2008, she died in her sleep in the apartment of her mother Maya Afanasyevna - she had a heart attack. This was a serious blow for the entire writer's family.

A couple of months ago, Aksenov seemed to be on the mend. I started moving my right hand, working with a speech therapist, but...

On February 22, my father was transferred to Sklif and had surgery. Since then, the condition has been serious,” said the writer’s son Alexey Vasilyevich then, in February.

And now - the end. Vasily Aksenov died at the age of 77.

In the early 60s he was the most fashionable writer. At the age of 27 he wrote the story “Colleagues”, at 29 - “Star Ticket” - cult books for the sixties, who at that time were the same romantically minded boys and girls as Aksenov’s heroes. Aksenov's plays and films based on his scripts were a huge success. But it didn’t last long: discord quickly emerged between the internal freedom of his characters and the Soviet system. The Thaw ended, the authorities began to treat Vasily Pavlovich with suspicion. In the 70s, he finally moved into the category of dissident writers: the publication of such novels as “Burn” or “Island of Crimea” in the USSR was out of the question. It all ended in forced emigration: Aksenov was deprived of Soviet citizenship and moved to America, where he began teaching literature.

The exile did not last long: just a few years later, perestroika began in the Soviet Union, Vasily Pavlovich returned to his homeland in triumph and again became one of the most popular authors. For the last twenty years he has been shuttling between America, Europe and Russia. He preferred to work in Biarritz. “It’s difficult to write in Moscow,” he said four years ago in an interview with KP, “you’re constantly distracted by something. In Biarritz it’s a different matter: there I have a small house on the seashore, only the waves are noisy and planes are flying overhead...”

Farewell to the writer will take place on Thursday morning at the Moscow Central House of Writers. He will be buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery.

AKSENOV’S MOST FAMOUS BOOKS:

* "Colleagues" (1960)
* "Star Ticket" (1961)
* “Overstocked Barrel” (1968)
* "Burn" (1975)
* “Island of Crimea” (1979)
* “Moscow Saga” (1994)
* "New Sweet Style" (1998)
* “Voltairians and Voltairians” (2004)

PERSONAL VIEW

A good man, cheerful and calm, left us across the dewy grass.

Alexander MESHKOV

The favorite writer of the youth of the 70s, Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov, has passed away.

Probably, after all, the main mission of this writer was to show our young, intimidated minds, clouded by harsh propaganda, that there is another life, another worldview and another literature, free from ideological dogmas. Aksenov did it very subtly, beautifully, boldly and cheerfully.

It was necessary to try even harder to suspect his works of unreliability. Skillfully using irony and delicately juggling literary cliches, Aksenov created his own unique secret language. Not knowing Vasily Aksenov during my student years was considered bad manners.

I came to the university not knowing him. I had an excuse: I had just returned from the army, there were no books there. And by the time I returned, Aksenov’s books had already been removed from libraries. Clean up: “Colleagues”, “Overstocked Barrels”, “Oranges from Morocco”, “It’s Time, My Friend, It’s Time”, “Star Ticket”. In the new literary encyclopedia, Aksakov was immediately followed by Aksefeld Israel, then Aksirov Zalimkhan. The film “Colleagues” and the sparkling comedy “Striped Flight”, the script of which Aksenov wrote together with Viktor Konetsky, disappeared from the screens. Aksenov was erased from our lives; he was buried by the literary elite back then. But not us.

In 1980, when Aksenov was deprived of Soviet citizenship, his books could still be read in the theater library for a long time after the ban. True, only in the reading room. That's where we went. In those days, we had to read Aksenov secretly, on the sly. And “on the sly” the banned books of the rebel Aksenov were brought from abroad by our friends, agents of world imperialism, foreign trainees from England, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland and America. They even brought the scandalous almanac Metropol, corrupting our fragile souls with this pulp fiction. They wondered why we, Russians, do not have the right to read completely harmless and even politically biased books by our own Russian writer.

After all, Aksenov even had a book from the “Fiery Revolutionaries” series. “Love of Electricity” is called, about Commissioner Krasin. But we understood that writers also need to eat something, and we ourselves read his play “The Four Temperaments” aloud in the dorm, rolling around on the floor with laughter. His "Bochkotaru", like Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit", was stolen for quotes. We spoke the language of our favorite heroes, like conspirators. Old man Mochenkin, grandfather Ivan, was our favorite. It is then that he will return to us, justified by the authorities, already serious and academic, to open to us his heart, wounded by the lashes of trials and arrows of loss, in the main work “The Moscow Saga”.

All the amusing, sweet and apolitical heroes of “Overstocked Barrels,” who are so similar to us, have the same good dream: “... as if a good man, cheerful and calm, was walking along the dewy grass.” Probably, it was Vasily Pavlovich Aksenov himself, before whom we, the confused and deceived generation, about whom and for whom he wrote, bow our gray and no longer shaggy heads...

The Soviet writer, playwright Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov, whose biography, personal life and creative path we will consider in our article today, was a truly extraordinary and courageous person. He carried his free thoughts to the masses, without regard for prohibitions, which greatly irritated those in power. He was loved, he was admired, he was banned. But he never stopped writing.

The future world-famous playwright was born on August 20, 1932 in the city of Kazan. His childhood occurred during the most difficult time for our country. And already as a five-year-old child, Vasily learned what separation from loved ones was.

In 1937, during the Stalinist campaign to expose the “cult of personality,” both of the boy’s parents were arrested and sent to camps until 1947. And if the father, Pavel Vasilyevich Aksenov, had a rather distant relationship with culture and art. Then mother Evgenia Ginzburg, who first taught at a pedagogical university, and then took charge of the cultural department of a local newspaper, was, according to the authorities, the first candidate for Stalin’s camps.

Vasya was the least fortunate in this terrible story, because unlike his half-sister Maya and brother Alexei, who were taken by their closest relatives, he, as the only common child of the prisoners, was unconditionally sent to an orphanage. And only a year later his paternal uncle, Andriyan Vasilyevich, found the child and took him to him.

Vasily lived in the house of his uncle and his wife until his mother, who was in exile in Magadan after prison, received permission for the heir to come to her. A few years later, Evgenia Solomonovna Ginzburg will talk about this meeting in her book of memoirs, “Steep Route.” And a few more decades later, in 1975, already a famous writer, Vasily Aksyonov himself will talk about his harsh youth in the autobiographical novel “Burn”.

In 1951, Vasily Pavlovich entered one of the leading Leningrad medical universities, which he graduated brilliantly 5 years later. This allowed him to receive assignment to long-distance ships, which he was supposed to accompany as a full-time doctor. Then young Vasily was incredibly happy about such a rare opportunity, because the whole world was open to him. However, it was then that he received his first “poke” from the Soviet authorities, who never gave him access to his dream job. Although Aksyonov’s parents had already been rehabilitated at that time.

And so it happened that instead of new countries, the young man was forced to go north to work there as a quarantine doctor. But after some time he was lucky enough to find a place in Moscow, where he immediately moved.

Creation

The beginning of Vasily Aksenov’s creative biography dates back to 1959-1960. It was then that the story “Colleagues” came out from his pen, which was accepted for publication and made the aspiring author famous throughout the USSR. Then other works of the writer see the light of day. And below we list the most significant of them.

• He also has children's works to his credit. For example, “My Grandfather the Monument” and “The Chest in which Something is Knocking,” published in the 70s. During the same period, the author experimented with the historical and biographical genre, coming up with the work “Love of Electricity,” which was dedicated to the Russian revolutionary Krasin.

• Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was also involved in book translations.

It should be noted that the creative path of the writer Aksenov was not so cloudless. Despite the fact that the Soviet reader clearly liked his stories, novels and short stories, and literary magazines and publishing houses willingly published them, the authorities were not always happy with the works of Vasily Pavlovich.

For example, in 1963, at a spring meeting with the Soviet intelligentsia, the country's leader Nikita Khrushchev gave Aksyonov a “demonstrative flogging.” As it turned out, Nikita Sergeevich was sure that the writer’s works emanated dissidence, and in general, all his books went against the policies of the USSR.

And, it should be noted that Khrushchev was not so wrong. After all, the writer really did not agree with the current government on many issues, which forced him, along with other cultural figures, to go to the Kremlin walls and organize pickets. As a result, all this led to the fact that in 1980 Aksyonov became an emigrant.

Emigration

Having received an invitation to the United States, the writer decided to move there. And immediately after that he was deprived of citizenship of the Soviet Union, which Aksyonov was able to return only many years later. In exile, Vasily Pavlovich taught literature in the best educational institutions in America, and also worked as a correspondent for radio stations.

He did not forget about writing. Then several books came out from his pen, the most striking of which were “The Decade of Slander” and “The Moscow Saga,” which became the script for a series filmed in the early 2000s.

In the early nineties, Aksenov regained his Russian citizenship. However, he was in no hurry to return home, deciding to settle in France.

Personal life

Vasily Aksyonov did not forget to arrange his personal life, because even from the photo it is clear that he was a very charming man.

The writer created a family twice. His first wife was Kira Mendeleeva, an intelligent and highly educated girl from a good family. They met in 1956 and got married 6 months later. And in 1960, Kira gave birth to Vasily’s son Alexei. The famous writer had no more children.

Vasily Pavlovich met his second wife Maya Carmen in the mid-sixties. At that time, Maya was the wife of director Roman Carmen. However, the relationship between her and the writer arose at lightning speed. The ensuing romance led to conflicts in both families and Aksyonov’s divorce. And in 1980, after the death of director Carmen, the couple got married. Soon they flew to the USA, after which they lost the right to return to Russia. The situation was corrected only in 2004.

The couple lived together until Aksyonov’s death in 2009.

Death

In January 2008, the famous writer suffered a stroke. To save his life, at the Research Institute named after. Sklifosovsky Aksenov underwent surgery. However, this did not help improve his condition. He was in a coma for a long time.

In the spring of 2009, the writer underwent a second operation, which also did not bring improvement, and on July 6 of the same year, after a long illness, Vasily Pavlovich died.

He was buried at the Vagankovskoye cemetery in the capital.