Pyotr Lvovich Vail (russian: Пётр Львович Вайль; born 29 September 1949,

Riga Riga (; lv, Rīga , liv, Rīgõ) is the capital and largest city of Latvia and is home to 605,802 inhabitants which is a third of Latvia's population. The city lies on the Gulf of Riga at the mouth of the Daugava river where it meets the B ...

Latvian SSR The Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (Latvian SSR), also known as Soviet Latvia or simply Latvia, was a federated republic within the Soviet Union, and formally one of its 16 (later 15) constituent republics. The Latvian Soviet Socialist Rep ...

– 7 December 2009,

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

Czech Republic The Czech Republic, or simply Czechia, is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Historically known as Bohemia, it is bordered by Austria to the south, Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, and Slovakia to the southeast. Th ...

) was a Russian author, journalist, essayist and deputy director of

Radio Liberty Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a transm ...

's Russia service.

Life

Born in

1949, he studied at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. He moved to the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., federal district, five ma ...

in 1977, joining the station in the mid-1980s. He moved to the

headquarters in 1995. In 1995, he reported from Chechnya. Vail's best-known books include ''Genii mesta'' (''The Genius of Place'') and ''Stikhi pro menya'' (''Poems About Me''). He produced several books with

Alexander Genis Alexander Genis (born February 11, 1953) is a Russian–American writer, broadcaster, and cultural critic. He has written more than a dozen books that are non-fiction bestsellers in Russia. Genis, an American citizen, resides in the New York Ci ...

, including ''Russkaya kukhnya v izgnanii'' (''Russian Cuisine in Exile'') and ''60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka'' (''The '60s. The World of Soviet People''). He co-edited ''Iosif Brodsky: trudy i dni'' (''Joseph Brodsky: Works and Days''), about

Nobel Prize The Nobel Prizes ( ; sv, Nobelpriset ; no, Nobelprisen ) are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." Alfre ...

-winning poet

Joseph Brodsky Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky (; russian: link=no, Иосиф Александрович Бродский ; 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996) was a Russian and American poet and essayist. Born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), USSR in 1940, ...

, with Lev Losev. He died in a Prague hospital.

References

1949 births 2009 deaths Writers from Riga Russian Jews Russian male essayists Russian food writers 20th-century essayists {{russia-writer-stub