Finally!

Olga Slavnikova received the prize for “novel of the year”

Over the fifteen years of the existence of the Russian Booker Prize, I only twice confidently (still overcoming a small amount of doubt) named the name of the future laureate. It's not a matter of likes and dislikes at all. They ask not who you would reward (this is where everything is usually clear), but who will be rewarded . So, I risked predicting in 1995, when Georgy Vladimov received the prize for “The General and His Army,” and this year, which brought the award to Olga Slavnikova for the novel “2017” (M., “Vagrius”, 2006).

Slavnikova had strong competitors: “Fish” by Pyotr Aleshkovsky, “Sanka” by Zakhar Prilepin, and (especially, in my opinion, great) “Villa Belle-Lètre” by Alan Cherchesov have real merits. (In Dina Rubina’s novel “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and Denis Sobolev’s collection of short stories “Jerusalem”, which is passed off as a novel, I, alas, cannot see anything attractive or even noteworthy.) But still, the premonition of Slavnikova’s victory came to me even before the announcement of the long list of contenders - immediately after reading the book. I read and understood - a novel. Multidimensional. Sensitively capturing the pains and anxieties of time and accurately recording them. Guided by the seeking thought. Maneuvering between a newspaper chronicle and a parable, a thriller and a pamphlet, a dystopia (well, yes, Slavnikova’s heroes live, suffer, search for precious stones, happiness, and freedom in the near future) and a fairy tale, an essay about the masters of their craft and a love story, but remaining a novel. I wrote in detail about “2017” - now I’ll say it briefly: finally!

This “exhalation” must be understood in three ways. Firstly, a problematic novel about our present and future has finally been written. Secondly, Slavnikova finally received the “highest” award. In 1997, her novel “Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog” was included in the Booker shortlist, but lost to “The Cage” by Anatoly Azolsky; in 2001, the story “Immortal” was awarded the small Apollo Grigoriev Prize (Andrei Dmitriev received the major prize for “The Way Back”). There is no shame in “losing” to such rivals, it is impossible to consider the decisions of those jury “biased”, but still... Thirdly, personal: finally, the verdict of the Booker jury is beyond doubt. I assessed the decisions of the panels of judges differently: sometimes I internally “seemed”, more often I accepted them as “someone else’s truth.” But what a shame it was when the writers lost, whom I still consider today to be the true winners of those bookeriads: Viktor Astafiev (“Devil’s Pit”, 1993), Alexey Slapovsky (“The First Second Coming”, 1994; “Day of Money”, 2000, - - I myself sat on the jury!), Andrei Dmitriev (“Turn of the River”, 1996), the same Olga Slavnikova (“Dragonfly...”, 1997), Irina Polyanskaya (“Passing a Shadow”, 1998), Vladimir Makanin (“ Underground, or Hero of Our Time”, 1999), Alexander Chudakov (“Darkness Falls on the Old Steps”, 2001), Leonid Zorin (“Jupiter”, 2003), Oleg Zayonchkovsky (“Sergeev and the Town”, 2004)... For Over the course of fifteen Booker years, I experienced pure joy three times: in 1992, when Mark Kharitonov received the first prize for “Lines of Fate, or Milashevich’s Chest,” in 1995, when Vladimov and his “General...” were awarded, and now. Finally!

Andrey NEMZER