Prominent Russian writer of Circassian ancestry Andrei Georgiyevich Bitov was born on May 27, 1937, and died on December 3, 2018, in Moscow.

Andrei Bitov’s father was an architect and his mother was a lawyer.

Bitov completed his secondary education in 1954 and began writing two years later.

During 1957, Andrei Bitov became a student at the Leningrad Mining Institute.

During that time Bitov joined a literary association for young writers led by Gleb Semyonov.

Bitov also served with a building battalion in the north and graduated in 1962.

Then, started writing poetry and short, absurdist stories which were not published until the 1990s.

Andrei Bitov became a member of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1965.

From 1978, Andrei Bitov had published ten works, but his now best-known work, Pushkin House, had to be published in the United States and did not appear in the USSR until two years after the beginning of Perestroika.

In 1988, Andrei Bitov was one of the founders of the Russian PEN Club and was its President beginning in 1991.

Bitov was also a teacher at the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute.

Andrei Bitov earned an award from Oktyabr magazine for his story Something with love… in 2013.

After that in 2014 by the Government Award of the Russian Federation for culture and, in 2015, he was given the Platonov Prize.

He received the Order of Friendship in 2018.

Andrei Bitov passed away at 81 years old.