Valentin Savvich Pikul (Russian:Валенти́н Са́ввич Пи́куль; July 13, 1928 – July 16, 1990) was aSoviet historical novelist of Ukrainian-Russian heritage. He lived and worked inRiga.
Pikul's novels were grounded in extensive research, blending historical and fictional characters and often focusing on Russian nationalistic themes.[1] Pikul's best-selling 1978 novelAt the Last Frontier was a dramatized telling ofRasputin'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]...[2] Pikul's works were wildly popular: more than 20 million copies were sold in his lifetime[1].
Little of Pikul's work has been translated into English. In May 2001 a seagoing minesweeper of theBlack Sea Fleet was named in his honor. So too was an oil tanker built in 2023 for state oil producerRosneft's shipping business.
^Natalya Ivanova, "A New Mosaic out of Old Fragments: Soviet History Re-Codified in Modern Russian Prose" (Conference Papers, Stanford University, October 1998), pp. 25-26.
^Richard Stites,Russian Popular Culture (Cambridge UP, 1992, repr. 1995), p. 151.
