George Feifer, "who chronicled mushroom hunting, ballet, prostitution, black-market sweetmeats and other fixtures of daily life in the Soviet Union, and who drew on his own encounters with Russian intellectuals and a fuming KGB agent for a pair of semi-autobiographical novels," died November 12, the Washington Post reported. He was 85.
"On his first trip to Moscow, for the American exhibition, he stood alongside a new Ford Thunderbird and answered questions from Russians including Tatyana Leimer, whom he married in 1969," the Post wrote, adding that their eventual divorce inspired his 1995 book Divorce: An Oral Portrait, drawn from interviews with divorced couples, lawyers, psychologists and children of divorce.
His novels include The Girl from Petrovka (1971), which was adapted into a 1974 movie starring Goldie Hawn and Hal Holbrook; and Moscow Farewell (1976). He also collaborated with Soviet-born dancer and choreographer Valery Panov on his autobiography To Dance (1978), and with Barbara and Barry Rosen on The Destined Hour (1982). Among his other titles are Tennozan (1992), Breaking Open Japan (2006), Justice in Moscow (1964) and Message from Moscow (1969). The Lyons Press will release a new edition of Tennozan, under the title The Battle of Okinawa: The Blood and the Bomb, next March
Feifer wrote one of the earliest biographies of Nobel Prize-winning author and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was then living in the Soviet Union. The Post noted that Solzhenitsyn (1972) "was released amid anger from its subject, who accused Mr. Feifer of spreading KGB lies and relaying 'fables' and 'coarse secondhand gossip.'... The biography also resulted in Mr. Feifer's being thrown out of the Soviet Union for the third time."
"He loved the place, while hating its politics," said his son, Gregory Feifer, a former Moscow correspondent for NPR. "He felt that Russia was the place where he felt the most human connection. Life was oppressive for most people, prospects were limited, so that by default the things that were important to him--love, food, friendship--were the things that were important to Russian society."