Author. One of the leading Russian modernists of the early 20th Century. A great experimenter in prose, he blended archaic, formal and colloqial Russian into an ornate style. Most characteristic were his contemporary reworkings of old religious and folk legends, with their bizarre flights of fancy and violent humor. Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov was born in Moscow. As a university student he got involved in Socialist activities and was banished to Siberia for eight years, where he acquired his lifelong passion for Russian folkore. Moving to St. Petersburg in 1905, he joined the Symbolists and his first two successful novels, "The Clock" (1908) and "The Pond" (1908), were in the spirit of that group. He was also associated with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes during its early years and contributed to the scenario for Stravinsky's ballet "The Firebird" (1910). Around this time he began incorporating more fantastic and medieval elements into his writing, as seen in the novels "The Indefatigable Cymbal" (1910), "The Sacrifice" (1911), and "The Fifth Pestilence" (1912). In "The Lay of the Ruin of the Russian Land" (1918) he adapted a 13th Century text about the Mongol Invasion to symbolize his response to the Russian Revolution. Remizov's literary innovations had a powerful influence on the first generation of Soviet writers, notably Zamyatin, Babel, and Pilnyak, but he was no fan of the Bolsheviks; he emigrated to Berlin in 1921 and settled in Paris two years later. He described his feelings about the new USSR in the book "Flaming Russia" (1927). James Joyce praised Remizov and the French Surrealists hailed him as a father figure, though he kept aloof from the younger avant-garde; he grew increasingly eccentric and in later years even alienated himself from the Russian emigre community by expressing a desire to return to the Soviet Union (which he never did). Little of his late work was published and he died in obscurity. Remizov's intricate writings pose a major challenge for translators and to date only a handful of his tales have appeared in English.