Midnight in Moscow, and Vassily Aksyonov, like many young Soviets in the 1950s, would find himself in some dark cellar listening to American jazz from pirated records cut on used X-ray plates. "Jazz on Bones," he and his friends called that marriage of music and medicine. "From the moment I heard a recording of Melancholy Baby . . ." he recalls, "I couldn't get enough of the revelation coming to me through the shadows of ribs and alveoli, namely, that 'every cloud must have a silver lining.' "
Aksyonov knew from clouds. His father, a Communist Party official, and his mother,...
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