Early life

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander was born in 1929 in the cosmopolitan port city of Sukhumi, Georgia (then part of the USSR) to an Iranian father (Abdul Ibragimovich Iskander) and an Abkhazian mother (Leili Khasanovna Iskander).^[2][3] His father was deported to Iran in 1938 and sent to a penal camp where he died in 1957.^[4] His father was the victim of Joseph Stalin's deportation policies of the national minorities of the Caucasus.^[2] As a result, Fazil and his brother Feredun and his sister Giuli were raised by his mother's Abkhazian family.^[2][4] Fazil was only nine years old at that time.^[5][6]

Career

The most famous intellectual of Abkhazia,^{[citation needed]} he first became well known in the mid-1960s along with other representatives of the "young prose" movement like Yury Kazakov and Vasily Aksyonov, especially for what is perhaps his best story,^[7] Sozvezdie kozlotura (1966), variously translated as "The Goatibex Constellation," "The Constellation of the Goat-Buffalo," and "Constellation of Capritaurus." It is written from the point of view of a young newspaperman who returns to his native Abkhazia, joins the staff of a local newspaper, and is caught up in the publicity campaign for a newly produced farm animal, a cross between a goat and a West Caucasian tur (Capra caucasica); a "remarkable satire of Lysenko's genetics and Khrushchev's agricultural campaigns, it was harshly criticized for showing the Soviet Union in a bad light."^[8][9]

He is probably best known in the English speaking world for Sandro of Chegem, a picaresque novel that recounts life in a fictional Abkhaz village from the early years of the 20th century until the 1970s, which evoked praise for the author as "an Abkhazian Mark Twain."^[10] Mr. Iskander's humor, like Mark Twain's, has a tendency to sneak up on you instead of hitting you over the head.^[10] This rambling, amusing and ironic work has been considered as an example of magic realism, although Iskander himself said he "did not care for Latin American magic realism in general".^[11] Five films were made based upon parts of the novel.^[12]

Iskander distanced himself from the Abkhaz secessionist strivings in the late 1980s and criticised both Georgian and Abkhaz communities of Abkhazia for their ethnic prejudices. ^{[citation needed]} He warned that Abkhazia could become a new Nagorno-Karabakh. ^{[citation needed]} Later Iskander resided in Moscow and was a writer for the newspaper Kultura.^[13]

On 3 September 2011, a statue of Iskander's literary character Chik was unveiled on Sukhumi's Muhajir Quay.^[14]

Works in English translation

• Forbidden Fruit and Other Stories, Central Books LTD, 1972.
• The Goatibex Constellation, Ardis, 1975.
• Lindsey, Byron; Iskander, Fazil; Burlingame, Helen (1976). "The Goatibex Constellation". Books Abroad. 50 (4): 905. doi:10.2307/40131179. JSTOR 40131179.
• Contemporary Russian Prose (English and Russian Edition), 1980 ISBN 978-0-882-33596-4
• Sandro of Chegem, Vintage Books, 1983. ISBN 978-0-394-71516-2
• The Gospel According to Chegem, Vintage Books, 1984.ISBN 978-0-394-72377-8
• Chik and His Friends, Ardis 1985.
• Bolshoi den bolshogo doma: Rasskazy, 1986
• Iskander, Fazil (May 1988). "Fooling with words". Index on Censorship. 17 (5): 19–20. doi:10.1080/03064228808534413. S2CID 146216870.
• Rabbits and Boa Constrictors, Ardis, 1989. (Co-authored with Ronald E. Peterson) ISBN 978-0-882-33557-5
• The Old House Under the Cypress Tree, Faber and Faber, 1996.
• The Thirteenth Labour of Hercules, Raduga, 1997.
• Rasskazy, povestʹ, skazka, dialog, ėsse, stikhi (Zerkalo) (Russian Edition), 1999 ISBN 978-5-891-78090-3
• Parom (Russian Edition), 2004 ISBN 978-5-941-17138-5
• Kozy i Shekspir: [Goats and Shakespear: ], Russian Edition, 2008
• Put' iz Variag v Greki (The Road from the Varangians to the Greeks), Russian Edition 2008 ISBN 978-5-969-10305-4
• Zoloto Vil'gel'ma: Povesti, Rasskazy (Gold of Vilgel'm: Stories, tales), 2010.
• L'energia della vergogna (Italian Edition), 2014.
• The Mystery of Conscience, 2016. ISBN 978-1-329-31637-9
• Departures, 2016 ISSN 1066-999X
• Sandró de Cheguem (Narrativa) (Spanish Edition), 2017 ISBN 978-8-415-50938-7
• Druzia-priiateli/Detstvo Chika, Russian Edition 2018 ISBN 978-5-928-72977-6
• Zvezdnyy kamen (Russian Edition), 2019 ISBN 978-5-969-11841-6
• The Commonwealth Reconstructed ISBN 978-5-871-07810-5
• Iskander, Fazil (1990). Les lapins et les boas (Littérature étrangère rivages). Rivages. ISBN 978-2-869-30408-6.
• Iskander, Fazil (1988). Kroliki i udavy. Книжная палата. p. 288. ISBN 978-5-700-00016-1.

Online

• Works by Fazil Iskander on Archive.org

Further reading

• Russian writer of Iranian origin hailed in Moscow. Archived 2015-05-18 at the Wayback Machine
• Kriza, Elisa (2021). "Blood Carnival and Its Variations in Mexican and Soviet Subversive Satires by René Avilés and Fazil Iskander". Comparative Literature Studies. 58 (2): 397–430. doi:10.5325/complitstudies.58.2.0397. S2CID 238010747. Project MUSE 794578.
• Milne, Lesley (1996). "Fazil' Iskander: From 'Petukh' to 'Pshada'". The Slavonic and East European Review. 74 (3): 445–463. JSTOR 4212146.