Поля Елисейские. Книга памяти

Vasily Yanovsky (1906, Poltava - 1989, New York) - prose writer, literary critic, doctor. In 1922, with his father and two sisters, he illegally crossed the Polish border, and in 1926 he left for Paris, where he studied at the medical faculty of the Sorbonne and actively participated in the literary life of Russian Paris. Vasily Yanovsky is from the younger, “unnoticed generation” of the first wave of emigration. Europe became their new homeland; they drew all the stories and images from the emigrant reality. Yanovsky was close friends with Boris Poplavsky, Yuri Felzen, and Valery. Dryakhlov; was familiar with D. Merezhkovsky and Z. Gippius (attended their “resurrections”), with I. Bunin, B. Zaitsev, V. Khodasevich, G. Ivanov and others. “Champs Elysees” - very personal, energetic, subjective memories about talented youth, whose names only years later became iconic for the Russian diaspora. And then they were unsettled, opposed themselves to the “senior writers” and believed that they had undeservedly found themselves in the background. This book can be placed on a par with the memoirs of Nina Berberova, Georgy Ivanov, Ivan Bunin, Teffi.

In his “book of memory,” Vasily Yanovsky acts not so much as a dispassionate chronicler of an “extraordinary decade” of literary and cultural life Russian Paris, but also as a temperamental polemicist and critic, boldly destroying established literary reputations. Nikolay Melnikov