[4] Aleksandr Kabakov was born in 22 October 1943 in Novosibirsk, where his family had been evacuated during World War II.

[5] He studied mechanics and mathematics in Dnipropetrovsk, and worked in a missile factory after graduation.

Eventually, he landed at the railroad industry newspaper Gudok [ru], where he worked for more than a decade; he also worked at Moscow News and Kommersant.

[6][7] He became well known during the Perestroika period for his dystopian novel No Return, which was translated into multiple languages and also adapted into a film.

[9] Other noted works include The Last Hero (1995) and Nothing's Lost (2003), which won the second jury prize from the Big Book Award and the Apollon Grigoriev Prize [ru].