Interview with David Shrayer-Petrov
David Petrovich Shrayer-Petrov, a distinguished physician and an acclaimed writer, was born in 1936, to a Jewish family in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). He studied medicine at the Leningrad First Medical School and received a Ph.D. from the Leningrad Institute of Tuberculosis. Shrayer-Petrov entered the literary scene as a poet and translator in the late 1950s, but first collection of verse, Canvasses, did not appear until 1967. He began writing novels while still in the USSR. But he hadn’t become a writer of short stories until he became a refusenik in he 1980s, and having already written three novels and two books of non-fiction. He spent nearly nine years as a refusenik that means that his applications for exit visas were repeatedly denied with no explanation. In the meantime, he was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, shunned by his Soviet counterparts and endured persecution by the Soviet authorities. In 1987, he and his family left the USSR and immigrated to the United States. He has authored twenty five books in Russian, with many of them being translated into almost a dozen languages soon after they were written.
Last year, the first English-language translation of his groundbreaking novel Doctor Levitin (known in Russian as Herbert and Nelly) came out. Written some 40 years ago, it was the first novel to depict the exodus of Soviet Jews and the life of refuseniks in limbo.