The Self in Search of Place in the Writing of Boris Khazanov

In various interviews and essays, Boris Khazanov (b. 1928) asserted that he finds nothing contradictory in identifying himself as a Russian-Jewish intelligent. Through many life phases—as a prisoner in the Stalinist Gulag, a Moscow doctor who wrote covertly for the Jewish samizdat, and a Russian-language writer living in Munich, he has adhered to this self-definition. This paper will examine how this identity expresses itself in his writings, especially in his fiction.