Dubious ten

Experts refused the Bunin Prize

Among the numerous literary prizes, recently, since 2005, another one has appeared - the Bunin Prize, with a very serious amount of bonuses (20 thousand euros), which, of course, attracted additional attention to it. Because among the founders of the prize are organizations that are not exactly reputable, but some are not entirely clear: Moscow University for the Humanities, Society of Lovers of Russian Literature, National Union of Non-State Universities, National Institute of Business, Center for Contemporary Literature. However, at least educational institutions can establish awards; no one has been ordered to do so. The main thing is that the goal and strategy are clear, then the prize is useful for the literary process. But Buninskaya has the biggest problem with these determining factors.

At first, the prize was prosaic, at least the first two laureates were chosen from among prose writers: Vadim Mesyats and Andrey Bitov. But in the spring of this year, there was a change in the rules of the prize: it was now decided to award the poet, but not 20 thousand euros, but only fifteen. The remaining five were to go to the literary critic (alas, the difference in the size of the award reflects the place of criticism in the social hierarchy). But since the Poet Prize already exists in the literary world, the organizers preferred not to focus on poetry, but to choose a new artistic genre for the award each time. Why not, you can reward, well, for example, journalism, or drama, or humor...

The presentation of the prize to the poet and critic is supposedly scheduled for October 23, and the jury, led by a great connoisseur and connoisseur of poetry, Svyatoslav Belza, will decide which of the ten nominees to give the prize.

But first, the long list of the prize was selected, it included as many as 84 poets, among them Yuri Kublanovsky, Irina Lisnyanskaya, Gleb Gorbovsky, Ivan Zhdanov, Victor Kulle, Gleb Shulpyakov, Sanjar Yanyshev, Alexey Tsvetkov, Sergey Gandlevsky, Bakhyt Kenzheev, reported “ Merchant." At the end of September, the long list was supposed to be reduced to a short one, and the critics were not told anything about the award at all, but in addition to the main award, they promised four more - one thousand euros each - to the finalists of the short list.

However, on Friday, August 24, the expert council of the Bunin Prize suddenly bucked, announcing its self-dissolution and abdication of responsibility for the published list of applicants, RIA Novosti reported. The experts, as stated in the statement, were brought to such a step by the actions of the board of trustees, which, without a preliminary examination, included ten nominees in the (already long) list of ten nominees, constant changes to the rules of the award and the cancellation of decisions previously made by the expert council.

Experts fear that the “ten” imposed by the organizing committee will turn out to be “privileged”, and it is these names that the organizing committee will lobby in the future, although the members of the expert council, specialists in modern literature, have never heard anything about some of them and are not familiar with their work. And the behavior of the members of the organizing committee has not yet guaranteed the independence and impartiality of the decisions made. “The picture that emerges is strange: the expert council becomes a sham body, whose opinion no one is interested in. We, naturally, cannot and do not want to prevent the presentation of the Bunin Prize to those to whom the founders want to present it. But the expert council has nothing to do with this,” - - said one of the members of the expert commission, RSUH professor Dmitry Bak.

It is reported that six of its nine members voted for the self-dissolution of the expert council. The remaining three spoke neither for nor against.

So now, left without expert opinion, the Bunin Prize has become even more dubious than it was with the experts. In general, it’s strange that finding quite a bit of money for a bonus turns out to be easier than clearly explaining to everyone and to ourselves exactly what and why this money is going to be spent and why the whole thing is being started in general. “We’re making noise, brother, we’re making noise,” as the character in Griboyedov’s immortal comedy said.

Gleb MYSHKIN