Five Literary Biographies by Alexandra Popoff

In my career as a biographer I pursued diverse subjects, researching the lives of Russian writers, particularly of Tolstoy. I wrote a book about Russia’s literary women who were central to the creativity of the literary giants –– Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, and Solzhenitsyn. I also produced a biography of the Soviet Jewish writer and journalist Vasily Grossman, whose topics include the Holocaust, World War II, and Ukraine’s famine. And finally, I’ve written a concise interpretive biography of Ayn Rand, published in 2024 by Yale UP, Jewish Lives.