ISKANDER, FAZIL

born March 6, 1929, Sukhumi, Georgia, U.S.S.R. in full Fazil Abdulovich Iskander Abkhazian author who wrote in Russian and used gentle humour to expose and satirize a variety of social ills. Iskander grew up in Sukhumi and graduated from the Gorky Literary Institute in 1954. Though Iskander is known mostly for his prose works, he started his career as a poet, publishing five volumes of verse between 1957 and 1964. His first two collections of stories, Zapretny plod (Forbidden Fruit and Other Stories) and Trinadtsaty podvig Gerakla (The Thirteenth Labor of Heracles), were published in 1966. Set in Abkhazia in the 1940s and '50s, the short stories are typically told from a child's perspective. His allegory Kroliki i udavy (1982; Rabbits and Boa Constrictors) was compared to George Orwell's Animal Farm. Iskander's major work of satire is the novel Sozvezdiye kozlotura (1966; The Goatibex Constellation), which focuses on the experiments in agricultural genetics conducted while Nikita Khrushchev led the Soviet Union. Iskander spent many years writing the epic novel Sandro iz Chegema (Sandro of Chegem), which consists of a series of anecdotes about the life of an Abkhazian folk character named Uncle Sandro. Excerpts from it were published in 1973; then, unable to issue an unabridged version in the Soviet Union, Iskander published a complete Russian-language edition in the West in 1978. Because he contributed to a banned anthology in 1979, his writings were denied circulation in the Soviet Union, but he published additional sections of Sandro iz Chegema in the West in 1981. A version of the book was published in Russia in three volumes in 1989, even though Iskander continued to work on it. Put (1987; The Path) is a selection of his poetry from the 1950s to the '80s.