Pyotr Lvovich Vail was a Russian author, journalist, essayist and deputy director of Radio Liberty's Russian service. Born in Riga 1949, he studied at the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. He moved to the United States in 1977, joining the radio station in the mid-1980s. He moved to the Prague headquarters in 1995. Vail's best-known books include Genii mesta (The Genius of Place) and Stikhi pro menya (Poems About Me). He produced several books with Alexander Genis, including Russkaya kukhnya v izgnanii (Russian Cuisine in Exile) and 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka (The '60s. The World of Soviet People). He co-edited Iosif Brodsky: trudy i dni (Joseph Brodsky: Works and Days), about Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky, with Lev Losev. He died in a Prague hospital.