In October 1956, on the verge of his seventieth birthday, Mark Aldanov wrote to his long-standing friend Vera Nikolaevna Muromtseva-Bunina, the widow of the Nobel Prize winning author Ivan Bunin: “my funeral (a jubilee is always a funeral) is planned for 7 November”. Unfortunately, his joke turned out to be prophetic: he died in his sleep at home in Nice a few months later, in February 1957.
Aldanov (an anagram of his real surname) was born Mark Landau in 1886 in Kyiv, to a large and wealthy Jewish family involved in sugar-processing and brick-making businesses, founded by Aldanov’s maternal grandfather, Iona Zaitsev. (When Menahem Mendel Beilis, an employee at the Zaitsev factory, had been falsely accused of ritual murder, he was defended by a famous Russian barrister, Vasilii
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Citation: Rogatchevskaia, Ekaterina. "Mark Aldanov". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 31 August 2015 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13302, accessed 21 November 2024.]
