The Inseparable Twins

Front Cover
Picador, 1991 - Soviet Union - 256 pages

From inside the book

Contents

Section 1
13
Section 2
22
Section 3
29
Copyright

21 other sections not shown

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About the author (1991)

Writer Anatoly I. Pristavkin was born in a Moscow suburb on October 17, 1931. Both of his parents died when he was young, so he was sent to an orphanage in the Caucasus. At the age of 12, he went to work in a canning factory. He completed a junior college course in aircraft mechanics and served in the army. In 1958 he published his first sketches and in 1959 he graduated from the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. He worked as a concrete mixer during the construction of the Bratsk Electric Station in Siberia. The difficulties in his childhood showed in the suffering children portrayed in his 26 novels as well as his opposition to the Soviet authorities. His most widely available novel in English is The Inseparable Twins, in which he recalled how he and other orphans were treated in a godless society. In the 1990's, he led the Presidential Pardons Commission, which eventually freed 70,000 convicted criminals. He was an opponent of the death penalty and used his position to help reduce the number of executions from 228 of 470 people from 1989 to 1991 to 10 per year from 1993 to 1995. He died on July 11, 2008 at the age of 76.

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