Yury Nagibin's prose has been widely read by Russian readers for more than 50 years. He always had a rare combination, for Russian literature, of being a professional storyteller, a sensitive person, and a free thinker. Even the authorities were ready to tolerate him, if not praise him. His admirers compared him with Ivan Turgenev or saw him as a combination of Truman Capote and Irving Shaw.


Though Nagibin died last year, his fans can now get his last book, published posthumously by Slovo in Moscow. The 300-page bestseller consists of two autobiographical novels; "My Gold Mother-in-Law" and "Darkness in the End of the Tunnel."


Born in Moscow in 1920, Nagibin first became known as a war correspondent, writing for both the Russian daily Trud and Soviet War News Weekly in London.


In the early 1960s, he published the first honest novel about a post-war Russian village and its kolkhoz associated collective farm. "Chairman," a film based on that book, was an even greater event in the cultural and ideological life of the Soviet Union.


Later Nagibin repeated this success, writing about disabled people isolated or, more accurately, imprisoned on the northern island of Kizhi so that they did not psychologically and aesthetically disturb "normal" people in the big cities.


More recently, Nagibin, who was half Jewish, focused on the growing antisemitism in the Soviet Union -- a theme present throughout "Darkness in the End of the Tunnel." His other novel, "My Gold Mother-In-Law," is a candid story of his carnal love of Tatyana Zvyagintseva, wife of Stalin's minister and mother of his wife.