| Alexey Varlamov became the winner of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize The ninth Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize was awarded to Alexey Varlamov “for his subtle study in artistic prose of the strength and fragility of the human soul, its fate in the modern world; for understanding the paths of Russian literature of the twentieth century in the genre of writer’s biographies.”
Alexey Varlamov was born in 1963 in Moscow, graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in 1985, made his debut as a prose writer in 1987 (October magazine), published his first book - "House in Ostozhye" - in 1990 (M., "Young Guard") Over the course of a decade and a half, his stories, novels, and novels were published with enviable regularity in very different magazines (“Znamya”, “Youth”, “Grani”, “Mite”, “Literary Studies”, etc.); Recently, Varlamov has been especially willing to publish in “Moscow”, maintaining, however, good ties with “October” and “New World”. He twice (1995, 1997) became a laureate of the annual “October” awards, and for the story “Birth” (1995) published by Novy Mir he was awarded the first “Anti-Booker”.
The writer works in a variety of genres: from lyrical stories (often stylized in the spirit of memoirs) to adventurous political narratives (“The Eleventh of September”), from novels-parables (“The Loch”, “The Sunken Ark”) to the history of his own spiritual formation (“ Kupavna"). What remains unchanged in all of Varlamov’s works is his slightly stylized “noble antiquity” (more like Shmelev and Zaitsev than Leskov and Turgenev), soft narrative style, sympathy for the timid and spiritually bright “little man” (who lives so poorly among the post-perestroika grabbers and careerists), unobtrusive but tangible symbolism (often religious), neat psychologism, peaceful landscapes and other signs of high-quality traditional writing (as expected, not excluding precisely dosed elements of fantasy and the grotesque). Apparently, this is why Varlamov’s prose never gave rise to intense discussions. The overwhelming majority of the literary community treats the writer with calm favor. The few exceptions include the author of these lines, who harshly attacked the story “Birth” and skeptically assessed Varlamov’s “ideological” novels. I haven’t changed my opinion about these works even now, but I think it should be noted: Varlamov has undoubtedly elegant stories and short stories (for example, if we talk about the latest things, “Valdez” - “New World”, 2005, No. 2; selection in No. 7 of “October” for 2004, opening with the excellent story “The Man”), and his work in the biographical genre was specially noted by the jury of the Solzhenitsyn Prize (books about Mikhail Prishvin and Alexander Green in the “ZhZL” series; a book about Alexey should appear here soon Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the magazine version of which - “The Red Jester” - has already been published by Moscow - 2005, Nos. 6-8) deserves all approval.
Varlamov is the second prose writer to receive the “full” Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (the first was Valentin Rasputin - 2000; Konstantin Vorobyov and Evgeny Nosov in 2001, Leonid Borodin - in 2002 - were awarded only “half" prizes). Varlamov is the first (except for actor Yevgeny Mironov, who was awarded for his performance as Prince Myshkin in the TV novel “The Idiot”) young “Solzhenitsyn” laureate. One can evaluate the current selection of the jury in different ways (along with the founder of the prize, it includes Natalya Solzhenitsyna, Lyudmila Saraskina, Valentin Nepomnyashchy, Nikita Struve, Boris Lyubimov and Pavel Basinsky, a long-time convinced and faithful sympathizer, interpreter and apologist of Varlamov’s prose), but one cannot count its indistinct or random. Andrey NEMZER |
|
