Georgii Ivanovich Gazdanov (; ) was born in 1903 in
Saint Petersburg but was brought up in
Siberia and
Ukraine, where his father worked as a forester. His father was from
Ossetia, a
North Caucasian region within the
Russian Empire. He took part in the
Russian Civil War on the side of
Wrangel's
White Army. In 1920, he left Russia and settled in Paris, where he was employed in the
Renault factories. His early short stories and novels dealt with this Russian experience. But by the mid-1930s, the years in Paris turned Gazdanov's themes toward life, Russian or French, in France. Later, he earned his living as a
taxicab driver. Gazdanov can be regarded as a
White émigré. He died in
Munich in 1971. Gazdanov's first novel —
An Evening with Claire (1929) — won accolades from
Maxim Gorky and
Vladislav Khodasevich, who noted his indebtedness to
Marcel Proust. In "Black Swans", a 1930 short story, the protagonist commits suicide because he has no chance of moving to Australia, which he imagines to be an idealised paradise of graceful
black swans. On the strength of his first short stories, Gazdanov was described by critics as one of the most gifted writers to begin his career in emigration. Gazdanov's mature work was produced after World War II. He tried to write in a new genre,
metaphysical thrillers. His mastery of criminal plots and understanding of psychological detail is evident in his two most popular novels,
The Spectre of Alexander Wolf and
The Return of the Buddha, whose English translations appeared in 1950 and 1951. The writer "excels in creating characters and plots in which cynicism and despair remain in precarious yet convincing balance with a courageous acceptance of life and even a certain
joie de vivre." In 1953, Gazdanov joined
Radio Liberty, where he hosted a program about
Russian literature (under the name of Georgi Cherkasov) until his death of lung cancer in 1971. Gazdanov's works were never published in the
Soviet Union. After several decades of oblivion, starting in the 1990s more than fifty editions of his works, including a three-volume collection (1998) followed by a five-volume collection (2009, ed. by T.N. Krasavchenko) were finally published in post-Soviet Russia. The Ossetian artistic community, led by
Valery Gergiev, had a new tombstone placed at his grave in
Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois. The annual Gazdanov Readings are held to discuss his literary heritage. == Selected works==