Igor Yefimov

Igor Markovich Yefimov or Igor Efimov (Russian: И́горь Ма́ркович Ефи́мов; born August 8, 1937, Moscow) is an American (since 1978) philosopher, writer and publisher of Russian origin. Some of his works were published under the pen name Andrei Moscovit. Together with Boris Vakhtin (), Sergei Dovlatov, Vladimir Gubin (), and Vladimir Maramzin (), he founded the Leningrad writers' group "City Dwellers" (Russian Gorozhane), whose works circulated in samizdat. He is a founder of Hermitage Publishers, publisher of works by such writers as Sergei Dovlatov.

Volume Nine of the Kratkaya Literaturnaya Entsiklopediya (Short Literary Encyclopedia), published in 1978, contains the short entry: "Yefimov, Igor Markovich, is a Russian Soviet writer, b. 1937. Graduated from Leningrad Politechnical Institute in 1960, member Union of Writers since 1965, author of the novels Smotrite, Who's Here!), Laborantka (Lab Girl), Svergnut Look Kto Prishel! (Vsyakoye Igo (To Overthrow Every Yoke), children's books, plays, movie, radio and television scripts." That volume of the encyclopedia appeared in the same month that the train carried the "Soviet writer" and his family to the West, crossing the border into Austria.

It was only after he left the USSR that Yefimov could acknowledge that the works of philosophy, Prakticheskaya Metafizika (Practical Metaphysics) and Metapolitika (Metapolitics), that had circulated in Samizdat and had been published in the West under the pseudonym Andrey Moskovit, were his. Settling in America, he soon founded the Hermitage publishing house (in 1981), which published poetry, novels, memoirs, and essays that could not be published in Soviet Russia. Many works of the Russian writers and poets who are well known today were first published by Hermitage: books by Sergei Averintsev, Vasily Aksenov, Fridrikh Gorenstein, Sergei Dovlatov, Lev Losev, Anatoly Naiman, Ernst Neizvestny, Mark Popovsky and others. Yefimov also wrote and published more novels—Kak Odna Plot' (As One Flesh - 1980), Arkhivy Strashnogo Suda (The Judgement Day Archives - 1982, English translation in 1988), Sed'maya Zhena (The Seventh Wife - 1990, English translation in 1994) -- as well as a historical investigation of the assassination of President Kennedy (English translation in 1997) and some collections of essays.

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