Anatoly Tikhonovich Gladilin (Анато́лий Ти́хонович Глади́лин; 21 August 1935 — 24 October 2018 ) was a Soviet and Russian writer who defected from the Soviet Union in 1976 and subsequently lived in Paris.

Biography

His “Chronicle of the Times of Viktor Podgursky,” published in the magazine “Yunost” at the end of 1956, had a great resonance. The writer was only 20 years old, and this alone already looked unusual for that time. The story is written in the genre of “confessional prose” and examines the theme of anxiety and inner loneliness of a living and sincere person in a world of regulated values. In his own words, he left the Literary Institute without finishing it, and did not know what to do next. But he unexpectedly received an invitation to Moskovskij Komsomolets to work as the head of the literature and art department[5]. In the sixties, Gladilin was considered a talented and promising young Soviet writer along with Vasily Aksyonov. In 1964, he took part in writing the collective detective novel He Who Laughs, published in the newspaper “Nedelya”. Gladilin openly opposed the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. The story “Forecast for Tomorrow,” written in 1972, was published only by the emigrant publishing house “Posev.” In 1976, Anatoly Gladilin was forced to emigrate from the USSR with his wife and daughter on an Israeli visa. In Paris, Gladilin worked for the Radio Liberty and the Deutsche Welle. Among his published works in the West was a novel, FSSR: The French Soviet Socialist Republic — a tale of a Communist coup in France. Gladilin was awarded the Medal of Pushkin in 2012.

Selected works