Gleb Botkin was born in Ollila, Finland, in 1900. In 1908 his father, Dr. Eugene Bdkin was appointed personal physician to the Czar of Russia and the family moved to the Imperial residence at Tsarkoe Selo, where they remained until 1917. In the sping of 1918 Gleb Botkin and his sister were separated from their father, who was taken by the Bolsheviks to Ekaterinburg and executed with the Imperial family.
In the same year, Gleb Botkin went to Tobolsk, there to study theology and undergo his novitiate for ordination to priesthood. The following year he went to Vladivostock as Censor of the Inter-Allied Military Censorship and on the faculty of the Far-Eastern University. He was later appointed secretary to the Bishop of Regiments of the Holy Cross and nine Cossack Armies and began then to contribute to the biggest Russian Far-Eastern Daily "The Voice of the Fatherland". He was later appointed member of the Editorial Staff and became Editor-in-Chief of a Monarchistic Daily, which was immediately suppressed.
In 1920 his arrest was ordered for loyalty to the Emperor, active counter-revolution, sabotage and refusal to serve in the Red Army. He fled to Japan, there serving as Diplomatic Secretary for the White Russian Government in Tokio. Upon the collapse of the anti-Bolshevik movement, he came to New York, where he lives with his wife and five children.
"The God Who Didn't Laugh" is a story of Tosha Stavroff in a Siberian monastery. Written with a dramatic intensity that is best simply described as cruciating human experience, and the searching analysis of character peculiar to the great Russian writers, the narrative treats the gradual blunting of Tosha's ideals. This leads him to enter into his novitiate and typifies the rebellion of youth against the outworn creeds which would have deprived him of his self respect and most cherished experiences in the outside world.
Gleb Botkin brings a fresh quality to American literature. This is the fluet, all-recording style of Proust, with the added vitality of his Russian heritage — the Tolstoian sensitiveness to the lights and shadows of human existence.