I love the fast pace of the Yasnaya Polyana award process: the winners were named today, only a month after I wrote about the finalists. Mikhail Tarkovskii won for his story collection Замороженное время (Frozen Time), about people who live along the Yenisei River.
One story from the collection, “Дед,” is available on Tarkovskii’s Web site. (If only it had paragraph breaks!) Other pieces, including “Кондромо,” which was a Belkin Prize finalist in 2003, are on Журнальный зал.
Mikhail Kuraev won the Contemporary Classic award. Kuraev is a versatile writer: I didn’t initially recognize his name, but then noticed that he wrote the screenplay for Петя по дороге в Царствие Небесное (Pete on the Way to Heaven is the IMDB title), which I’ve read about. As I wondered through lists of his work, I found that three of his novellas have been translated into English: Duke University Press published Night Patrol and Other Stories, translated by Margareta O. Thompson, in 1994. It includes the story about Pete/Petya that Kuraev adapted for film; Library Journal reviewed the collection favorably. Журнальный зал has links to some of Kuraev’s other works, here.
Up next: Leonid Iuzefovich’s Казароза (Kazaroza), a not-very-long novel involving murder and Esperanto. I’d intended to post about it today but am glad for some extra time to decide what to write about this peculiarly enjoyable book… I’m now reading Aleksandr Ilichevskii’s Матисс (Matisse), which begins with a lot of back story…
Kuraev's Night Patrol on Amazon
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Image credit: Map of the Yenisei Basin from Kmusser, via Wikipedia Commons.
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