2012 Yasnaya Polyana Winners

The Yasnaya Polyana Award announced 2012 winners today: Evgenii Kasimov won the “XXI Century” award for his story collection Назовите меня Христофором (Call Me Christopher) and Andrei Dmitriev received the first-ever “Childhood, Adolescence, Youth” award for Крестьянин и тинейджер (The Peasant and the Teenager), a book that’s also on the Booker and Big Book short lists. Valentin Rasputin won the “Contemporary Classic” award. I listed Yasnaya Polyana finalists in this previous post.

The other Rasputin:
Valentin

I still know close to nothing about Kasimov and his book, though I’ve already seen bits of (the inevitable!) grumbling about his win. (Kasimov is in politics.) Edit on October 11: The plot thickens... Lenta.ru reports that Iurii Buida claimed, in a Facebook post, that he would have won the prize for Blue Blood (previous post) had he been able to attend the award ceremony; Lenta also reported that Vladimir Tolstoy, the jury chair, claims Buida never got any official notification from the jury.

I’ve heard mixed reactions to Dmitriev’s book—inevitable, too, of course, for a book on so many short lists—which I’m looking forward to starting soon. Finally, I’ve read very, very little of Rasputin’s writing, though I’ve had one or two of his books on my shelves for years. Several English-language translations are available, including Farewell to Matyora and Live and Remember, both translated by Antonina W. Bouis, and Siberia, Siberia and Siberia on Fire, translated by Gerald Mikkelson and Margaret Winchell.

Disclaimers: The usual, plus I translated a story by Vladislav Otroshenko, a Yasnaya Polyana jury member.

Up next: Literary translator conference trip report (lots of Russian notes!), Marina Stepnova’s Lazar(us) and all his women, Serhij Zhadan’s Voroshilovgrad, and much more.

Image credit: Valentin Rasputin, creative commons, via Wikipedia.