Writers & Intellectuals

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Argentine literary giant and lifelong collaborator of Borges

Alexander Genis

Soviet-born essayist who became the defining voice of Russian emigre literary culture in New York

Alexandre Kojève

The Russian who reinvented Hegel for the West

Allen Ginsberg

Poet of the Beat Generation; son of an emigrant from Nevel

Amos Oz

Israeli novelist born in Jerusalem to parents from Odessa and Rovno; author of A Tale of Love and Darkness

Anne Applebaum

Historian and journalist, author of Gulag: A History (Pulitzer Prize 2004) and Red Famine; her great-grandparents emigrated from what is now Belarus

Arthur Miller

American playwright of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible

Ayn Rand

From Petrograd tenements to American philosophy

Barbara Walters

American broadcast journalist; the first woman to co-anchor a US network evening news programme

Boris Akunin

Georgia-born master who reinvented Russian crime fiction

Boris Schnaiderman

Uman-born Brazilian translator and scholar, first professor of Russian literature at the University of São Paulo

Chuck Palahniuk

Novelist of Fight Club, born in Pasco, Washington

Clarice Lispector

Ukraine-born Brazilian literary genius called the greatest Jewish writer since Kafka

Clement Greenberg

Son of Russian-Lithuanian Jewish immigrants who became the most powerful art critic of the 20th century

Crazy Russian Hacker

Donetsk-born YouTuber Taras Kul who became America's favourite science and life-hacks host

David Grossman

Israeli novelist; winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize and the 2018 Israel Prize

David Remnick

Russian-Jewish descended New Yorker editor who won the Pulitzer for his book on the Soviet collapse

Dmitry Glukhovsky

Moscow novelist who created the Metro series and became Russia's best-selling sci-fi author in exile

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

St Petersburg-born Symbolist novelist and critic, repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize, who died in Paris

Yuri Dud

Russia's most-watched interviewer — his YouTube documentaries on the Gulag and Soviet history reached tens of millions

Emmanuel Levinas

Philosopher of ethics and 'the face of the other', born in Kovno in 1906; introduced Husserl and Heidegger to French philosophy

Etgar Keret

Israeli short story master with Russian-Polish roots who writes fables for the absurd present

Gary Shteyngart

Leningrad-born novelist whose satirical fiction made him the voice of the Russian-American experience

Henri Troyat

French novelist and biographer born Lev Tarasov in Moscow in 1911; Prix Goncourt 1938, Académie française 1959, biographer of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Catherine the Great

Irène Némirovsky

Novelist born in Kiev, author of David Golder and Suite française; died at Auschwitz in 1942

Isaac Asimov

The Russian-born prophet of the Space Age

Jacobo Zabludovsky

Mexico City-born son of Polish Jewish immigrants; anchor of Televisa's 24 Horas (1970–1998)

Jim Downey

Saturday Night Live political-comedy writer, called the 'best political humorist alive' by Lorne Michaels

Jonathan Safran Foer

Novelist of Everything Is Illuminated, born in Washington, D.C.; grandson of Holocaust survivors from Volhynia

Joseph Roth

Born in Brody on the Russian Empire border, wrote the great requiem for the Habsburg world

Lev Shestov

Kyiv philosopher of the absurd who influenced Camus and Sartre — the great outsider of Russian thought

Lex Fridman

Moscow-born mind mapping the AI frontier

Michael Chabon

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist from an Ashkenazi Jewish family

Murray Bookchin

New York anarchist thinker with Russian-Jewish roots whose ideas inspired the Kurdish revolution in Syria

NFKRZ (Roman Abalin)

Chelyabinsk-born YouTube journalist and cultural commentator with millions of international followers

Nathalie Sarraute

French novelist born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk; a founder of the nouveau roman, author of Tropismes and Enfance

Nicolas Berdyaev

Born in Kyiv — Russia's greatest religious philosopher, expelled by Lenin on the Philosophy Steamer

Nina Berberova

Born in St. Petersburg — émigré novelist who was rediscovered at 80 and became a literary sensation

Norman Mailer

American writer, twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize; grandson of Lithuanian Jews (Russian Empire)

Peter Shukoff

American comedian and rapper, co-creator of Epic Rap Battles of History; son of a Russian father

Romain Gary

Born in Vilnius, raised in Nice — won the Prix Goncourt twice under two names, the only writer ever to do so

Sasha Sokolov

Born in Ottawa to Soviet spy parents — became Russia's most avant-garde novelist and escaped the USSR in a wetsuit

Sergei Dovlatov

Writer born in Ufa and raised in Leningrad who emigrated in 1978; eight of his stories appeared in The New Yorker

Sholem Aleichem

Born in Pereyaslav, Ukraine — the Mark Twain of Yiddish literature whose Tevye the Dairyman became Fiddler on the Roof

Tad Szulc

Warsaw-born New York Times journalist who covered the Bay of Pigs and became one of America's greatest foreign correspondents

Tatyana Tolstaya

Leningrad-born writer and TV host — great-grandniece of Leo Tolstoy and Russia's sharpest satirical voice

Teffi (Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya)

Humorist and short-story writer, the most popular Russian woman writer of the 1910s, who left Russia in 1919 and spent her last three decades in Paris

Ilya Varlamov

Russia's most popular urban blogger who fled to exile after opposing the Ukraine war

Viktor Pelevin

Born in Moscow — Russia's most mysterious and celebrated contemporary novelist

Vitaly Zdorovetskiy

Vladimir Nabokov

Exiled genius who reinvented the English novel

Vladimir Sorokin

Born in Bykovo — Russia's most provocative living novelist, now in Berlin exile

Vladimir Voinovich

Satirist born in Stalinabad, author of The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin; lived in Germany 1980–1990

Wladimir Kaminer

Born in Moscow — the author and DJ who turned being a Russian in Berlin into the funniest book of the 2000s

Zhanna Nemtsova

Daughter of assassinated Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov — journalist and democracy activist in Germany

Zinaida Gippius

Born in Tula — the greatest female poet of the Silver Age, who called the Revolution 'the triumph of evil'

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Writer born in Kislovodsk; Nobel Prize in Literature (1970)

Katja Petrowskaja

Born in Kyiv — Maybe Esther became one of the most celebrated European literary debuts of the century

Olga Grjasnova

Baku-born German-language novelist, winner of the Anna Seghers Prize

Anatoly Kuznetsov

Born in Kyiv — survived Babi Yar as a boy, wrote the first eyewitness account of the massacre

Aharon Appelfeld

Escaped a Romanian labour camp at nine, survived three years alone in the forests, became Israel's foremost Hebrew novelist of the Holocaust

Vasily Grossman

Born in Berdichev, author of Life and Fate — the novel the KGB confiscated in 1961

Alexander Pushkin

Russia's national poet, born in Moscow; great-grandson of the African-born general Abram Gannibal

Yelena Khanga

Moscow-born journalist and TV host, granddaughter of African-American agronomists who moved to Soviet Uzbekistan in 1931

Charles Ephrussi

Art historian and collector born in Odessa in 1849; editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, patron of the Impressionists and a model for Proust's Swann

Edmund de Waal

British ceramic artist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes; great-grandson of Viktor von Ephrussi, born in Odessa in 1860

Alberto Gerchunoff

Writer and journalist born in Proskurov in 1883; his Los gauchos judíos (1910) became a classic of Argentine literature

Avraham Shlonsky

Hebrew poet born in Kryukov, Poltava Governorate, in 1900; leader of the modernist poets of the 1920s and translator of Eugene Onegin and Hamlet; Israel Prize 1967

Boris de Zirkoff

Theosophist born in St Petersburg in 1902, grandnephew of Helena Blavatsky, who spent more than half a century editing her Collected Writings

César Tiempo

Argentine poet, playwright and screenwriter born Israel Zeitlin in Yekaterinoslav in 1906; creator of the fictional poet Clara Beter

Hermann Keyserling

Baltic German philosopher born in Livonia in 1880, author of The Travel Diary of a Philosopher and founder of the School of Wisdom in Darmstadt

Jacobo Timerman

Journalist and publisher born in Bar, Soviet Ukraine, in 1923; founder of Primera Plana and La Opinión, and author of Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number

L. L. Zamenhof

Ophthalmologist born in Białystok in 1859 who created Esperanto, the most widely used constructed international language

Samuel Glusberg

Editor and writer born in Kishinev in 1898, known as Enrique Espinoza; founder of the magazine Babel and one of the leading independent publishers of Latin America

Helena Blavatsky

Writer born in Yekaterinoslav in 1831 who co-founded the Theosophical Society in New York in 1875; author of Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine