SUMMARY:

Ilya Gerasimov interprets the last three novels by the famous Russian writer Vasily Aksyonov as an attempt to find an explanation to the failure of democratic (from below) westernization in Russia. Since the early 1960s, Aksyonov based all his books on the complicated relationships of Russian westernized intellectuals with Russian society at large, on the one hand, and idealized western culture and society, on the other. The gradual realization of the elusiveness of an idealized single “West” and vulnerability of modernity compelled Aksyonov to revise the old simplified worldview of the Russian intelligentsia. Gerasimov contends that in his last books Aksyonov came out with a new scenario for Russian intellectuals vis-à-vis the seemingly westernized regime and conservative popular masses.