The Spectre of Alexander Wolf

About Gaito Gazdanov

Gaito Gazdanov (Georgi Ivanovich Gazdanov 1903-1971) was the son of a forester. Born in St Petersburg and brought up in Siberia and Ukraine he joined Baron Wrangel's White Army in 1919 aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War until the Army's evacuation from the Krimea in 1920. After a brief sojourn in Gallipoli and Contantinople (where he completed secondary school) he moved to Paris where he spent eight years variously working as a docker washing locomotives and in the Citroën factory. During periods of unemployment he slept on park benches or in the Métro. In 1928 he became a taxi driver working nights which enabled him to write and to attend lectures at the Sorbonne during the day. His first stories began appearing in 1926 in Russian émigré periodicals and he soon became part of the literary scene. In 1929 he published An Evening with Claire which was acclaimed by among others Maxim Gorki and the great critic Vladislav Khodasevich. He died in Munich in 1971 and is buried in the Russian cemetery of Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois near Paris.