Translated material
Trends 2016: premium crisis
What's wrong with the "Big Book", "Russian Booker" and "Natsbest"
The results of the 2016 award season raised many questions: two of the three main awards were received by Leonid Yuzefovich, the third by Pyotr Aleshkovsky, about whose novel most critics speak extremely unflatteringly. Elena Makeenko looks into what problems our literary awards faced this year.Russian literary prizes are eternal hostages of the annual harvest. There is enough to make up one long list - enough for all the awards, no - no one is lucky. Hence the degree of predictability of the results. How many obvious leaders ended up on the short side can usually be seen with the naked eye. But when even the armed eyes of experts are filled with bewilderment, expect a scandal. Literary 2016 in Russia, judging by the awards, turned out to be a “C”, and their jury, accordingly, had a hard time. But what is bad for the reader is interesting for those observing the literary process, and we’ll talk about that.
(We know that in addition to major prizes, in Russia there is also the sophisticated Andrei Bely Prize, and the Arkady Dragomoshchenko Prize, which opens up poetic names, and the new Dmitry Gorchev Literary Prize, and many others. But in order not to bore the reader with the annual report, we will focus on those which most influence the annual “bibliography” on all shelves in the country.)
One warrior in the field
The absolute triumph of the current award season was Leonid Yuzefovich, who won the “Natsbest”, took first place in the final of the “Big Book” and received a grant from the “Russian Booker” to translate “Winter Road” into English and publish it in the UK. Almost everything about this victory is wonderful: the fact that the main book of the year was a serious documentary novel; and the fact that this is a novel about the Civil War, showing with non-didactic but firm insistence that on either side of any barricades there are just people (it’s difficult to come up with a more relevant topic); and, finally, that this is Leonid Yuzefovich, whose books are published rarely and remain “big” for a long time. The sad thing is that no one could give Yuzefovich strong competition this year. The minutes of the meeting of the counting commission, published after the presentation of the “BC”, show that the winner was ahead of the other nominees by almost a hundred votes, while between Vodolazkin, Ulitskaya and Ivanov, who were huddled behind him, there was a gap of 2-12 points.
Two chickens in one hand
The space on which the fruits of a writer’s labors fit has shrunk so much this year that the same Literary Academy, which votes for the “Big Book,” had to break the unspoken but sacred rule of any award: Lyudmila Ulitskaya designated it at the award ceremony with the great Soviet formula “Two Don’t give the chicken to just one person.” All the laureates of the country's main prize turned out to be double laureates this year (in ten years this has already happened with Shishkin, Bykov, Sorokin, Kabakov, but for the first time with all three finalists at once). From a publishing point of view, the laurels of the big three were neatly collected by Elena Shubina alone, whose editors published all the winning books. The last fact is not that surprising - Shubina really has a rare flair and during her work at RESH she managed to collect in her portfolio almost all the main Russian prose writers. But still, literary awards are too strong, if not the only working marketing tool, and in theory it should support not monopolies, but an ecological balance in the book market. It's not working yet.
Looking for the third
By the way, about the premium three. If everything is still clear with the major politics of “BC”, and “Natsbest” is necessary at least because, out of habit, to introduce a little confusion and St. Petersburg literature into the results of the year, then “Russian Booker” no longer has the strength to ask questions. The award is increasingly reminiscent of an elderly relative who has already lost his mind, but still manages a significant part of the family budget. If the brightest page in the history of the Russian Booker was the unforgettable victory of the novel “Flower Cross” in 2010, then this year it wasn’t even funny. Watching “RB” lost its meaning immediately after the announcement of the shortlist, which not only had nothing good in it (the same Yuzefovich and “Adoration of the Magi” by Sukhbat Aflatuni), but overall it reeked of mortal boredom. It must be said that the victory of Pyotr Aleshkovsky with the novel “The Fortress” temporarily revived the literary community: some openly spat, going through unsuccessful quotes, others defended the author’s idea, and in the end everyone quarreled, as always.
The bottom line is that the conclusion is quite objective: “Russian Booker” chose a conservative, straightforward and not very well written text as the novel of the year, recognizing itself as a defender of traditional values rather than the interests of modern literature and its reader. For this, it seems, it’s time to rightfully move him off the ship of modernity. Moreover, the unexpectedly refreshed “Yasnaya Polyana” began to breathe in the back of the head, the jury of which brought into the annual top two stories the original ones by Alexander Grigorenko (“I lost the blind pipe”) and Narine Abgaryan (“Three apples fell from the sky”). And this is not to mention the fact that the Nose Prize has long been crumpled on the pedestal, although it opposes itself to the mainstream in every possible way (from a tireless attempt to look for new literature and a new sociality to open debates, where they say out loud that masterpieces are again not visible ), but still replenishes the general reader list more diligently than others.
Closed space
The absence of new names in the overwhelming majority of premium lists could not help but be noticed even by readers who usually do not look at these lists. No matter how we feel about time-tested names, the choice of nominators and jury this year was more unfair than ever to debutants and simply writers who did not live up to the status of deserved ones. And if “dark horses” got into longs and shorts, it mostly looked like an absurd accident. For example, it is completely incomprehensible how Sasha Filippenko’s blatantly bad novel ended up in the finale of the Big Book. And the unexpected nomination for the “BK” of Vladimir Dints, a worthy contender for the “Enlightener” Prize, can only be explained by the fact that the Literary Academy is haunted by the internal freedom of its Swedish colleagues from the Nobel Committee. At the same time, the entire “Big Three” unanimously, as if by prior agreement, ignored, for example, Sergei Kuznetsov’s novel “Kaleidoscope” - a book that, it would seem, simply cannot but be included in the top ten best Russian novels of 2016 (the only prize that gave Kuznetsov a chance , became “Nose”, but we will learn its results only at the end of January). It was also surprising that not a single prize went to Alexei Ivanov, who seemed to have done everything possible to hold some kind of honorary statuette in his hands. And I don’t even want to count how many interesting books were left behind and didn’t get a chance to reach the buyer with the help of an attractive sticker with the name of the award.
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All these dubious trends make us think about whether literature is bad in Russia or whether it is the institution of prizes, which is more likely. Long lists can be shortened to short ones without looking, but the procedure requires starting from afar. Many texts that readers should know about do not come to the attention of the jury simply because publishers and magazines do not nominate them. Where the bonus policy has been in place for a long time, the results turn out to be predictable and often meaningless. Where the search for a concept occurs, it is unpredictable and also, in general, does not lead to anything due to the lack of clear guidelines for the search. We call the big prizes the mainstream, and part of their task is to determine the main direction of the literary process, to diagnose its condition. But it seems that this role has become so familiar to major award shows that they are replicating the image of literature from previous years, standing still like a broken weather vane.