Vasily Aksyonov | Exiled Russian writer, 76

Vasily Aksyonov, 76, a prolific Russian writer and one of the last dissidents to be exiled from the Soviet Union, died yesterday at a Moscow hospital.

He was being treated after suffering a stroke last year, his widow, Maya, told Ekho Mosvky radio.

Mr. Aksyonov wrote more than 20 novels during a career that included his forced exile from the Soviet Union in 1980 after he was branded "anti-Soviet." His most famous prose works were The Burn, The Island of Crimea, and The Moscow Saga, titled in English Generations of Winter.

He lived in the United States for more than two decades, teaching Russian and Russian literature at George Mason University in Virginia and working for Radio Liberty as a journalist, before returning to Russia.

He was born Aug. 20, 1932, in Kazan. His parents were sent to labor camps in the late 1930s at the height of Joseph Stalin's purges and he was placed in an orphanage. - AP