Writer Alexander Goryanin has died. He collaborated with Radio Liberty

In Moscow, the writer, historian, and translator Alexander Goryanin died after a serious long-term illness. He was 83 years old. For a quarter of a century, Alexander Goryanin collaborated with Radio Liberty.

Alexander Borisovich was born in Tashkent in 1941, graduated from the Faculty of Geography of Tashkent University, and worked on Central Asian expeditions. From his youth, fascinated by history and literature, he gradually changed his field of interest, moved to Moscow, became a researcher at the Lenin (now State) Library, published historical and bibliographic articles in magazines and in the Brief Literary Encyclopedia. He is the author of a number of documentary film scripts.

In the late Soviet years, Goryanin sent his manuscript “The Destruction of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior” to the West, which was published in London under a pseudonym. In 1967, he became the first reader in the USSR to write a letter to Vladimir Nabokov in Switzerland. Alexander Goryanin owns a brilliant translation of Nabokov’s novel “The True Life of Sebastian Knight.”

After perestroika, Goryanin published many books on Russian history – “Myths about Russia and the spirit of the nation”, “Traditions of freedom and property in Russia”, “Russia: a story of success” and others. In 2001, he published an autobiographical story, “Cargo,” about the delivery of Western editions of the Bible to the USSR.

For more than two decades, Alexander Goryanin collaborated with Radio Liberty, preparing programs on the history of the Civil War, and in recent years he read chapters of his unpublished memoirs at the microphone.