The directory «Plots»
Pikul (Ïèêóëü) Valentin Savvich
(1928—1990)
Valentin Pikul was a popular and prolific Russian historical novelist of Ukrainian-Russian heritage. He lived and worked in Riga.
Pikul's novels were grounded in extensive research, blending historical and fictional characters and often focusing on Russian nationalistic themes. Pikul's best-selling 1978 novel At the Last Frontier was a dramatized telling of Rasputin's influence over the Russian imperial court. Richard Stites says he was "a name hardly known to literary scholars but the most widely read author in the Soviet Union from the seventies to today [i.e., 1991]... Pikul's works were wildly popular in the book market (in the years 1967-1979 over a million copies were printed), but politically controversial because of his ardent Russian nationalism and xenophobia which was sometimes expressed in thinly veiled anti-Semitism”.
Little of Pikul's work has been translated into English. In May 2001 a seagoing minesweeper of the Black Sea Fleet was named in his honor.
Russia, 2008.07.13, 
Moskow. Valentin Pikul
Russia, 2008, 
Valentin Pikul
