Curiouser and Curiouser: The 2020 Big Book Award Winners

Well. Yes. So. Here we are. The Big Book Award announced winners this past ThBlursday. It’s easy enough to list the awardees. But what to say beyond that is beyond me.

The jury’s first prize went to Alexander Ilichevsky for Чертеж Ньютона (Newton’s Sketch). Timur Kibirov took second prize for his Генерал и его семья (The General and His Family). And Shamil Idiatullin won the bronze for Бывшая Ленина (Former Lenin Street, if I’m to keep it simple). The reader’s choice awards went to (first place through third) Mikhail Elizarov for Earth, Dina Rubina for Napoleon’s Caravan/Convoy, and Alexei Makushinsky for Предместья мысли. Философическая прогулка (The Outskirts of Thought. A Philosophical Stroll, something like that, perhaps?).

What to say? First, of course it’s supremely disappointing, yet again, that there weren’t many books written by women on the shortlist and that only one of six awards went to a woman. Then again, my second point is that this year’s shortlist was not the “lucky thirteen list” I’d hoped for when I wrote my post about the 2020 Big Book finalists back in June! The short version: not many of the books made positive impressions on me. Has the pandemic affected my reading this year? Of course it has. This year’s list, though, felt like a historical Big Book low, in terms of readability and literary quality. My top two books were Ksenia Buksha’s Churov and Churbanov (previous post), which I thoroughly enjoyed, and Elizarov’s Earth (previous post), which is a thought-provoking, carnivalistic novel about death. I appreciated Ch and Ch even more after some of the other books on the list for the simple reason that Buksha knows how to create a world. And knows when to stop writing. Elizarov is different in that he has not stopped writing – Earth is only book one of some sort of multi-tome something or other – but even though some scenes run too long, Elizarov certainly creates a world and certainly drew me in, made me curious, and made me want to keep reading. As I wrote before, the book has purpose.

Alas, I can’t say those things about many of the other books on this year’s long Big Book shortlist, though I’ll continue attempting to revisit a couple. I’m still hoping to find a way to break into Sofia Sinitskaya’s world and I thank Vasily Avchenko and Alexei Korovashko for Олег Куваев: повесть о нерегламентированном человеке (Oleg Kuvaev: Story of an Unregulated Person), my introduction to Kuvaev, whose Territory is now on the shelf. So Sinitskaya and Avchenko/Korovashko are two other pluses for this year.

In general, though, this year’s Big Book results left me sad, particularly since I’ve run across lots of social media evidence that other members of the Literary Academy, as well as non-jury observers, have similar feelings. I’ve seen the Ilichevsky win referred to with words including “catastrophe” and “scandalous,” though I’m not convinced it’s a debacle on the level of the 2010 Booker’s choice that popularized the word “афедрон” (RIP Russian Booker!). I’m usually the person who doesn’t fuss when my favorite books don’t win awards – for better or worse, juries and award administrators can do whatever the hell they want with jury awards – but I just can’t get this year’s ceremony, which I watched live on YouTube, out of my head.

It’s not just the eerie ambient music and Pushkin/quarantine graphic that looped during the start delay and, later, the tabulation delay. It’s not just that the tabulation delay was caused by (déjà vu!) a recount. Or that the votes were so very painfully close. (View the final tally here!) Or that Irina Barmetova, speaking about jurors’ ballots, said scores were lower this year, something she attributed to jurors taking greater care with their reading. Or that I did the exact opposite, still grading hard but using the full range of one to ten, awarding more high scores than usual given the large number of books on the list, the very obvious and very subjective differences in enjoyment and literary quality that I perceived and wanted to recognize, and the fact that ballot instructions specifically ask jurors not to give the same score too many times. Based on social media evidence, my guess is that I’m not the only juror who wasn’t thrilled with this year’s list.

I can say I felt grateful, almost relieved, when I clicked a link on a post from Natalya Lomykina, a Facebook Friend I’ve never met in real life. She wrote this piece for Russian Forbes. What she writes here doesn’t just tell me I’m far, far from alone in my surprise/shock/disbelieF about the results. Natalya’s article also addresses the literary quality of Earth, the shortcomings of the Ilichevsky book (which she calls многословный, wordy/verbose; I agree), Ilichevsky’s speech, and the possibility that Ilichevsky’s win says more about mathematics than literature. The math question is another reason I gave higher points to my favorite books this year: I’m one of dozens of jurors and wanted to give my top books all the help they could get. If you don’t read Russian but are interested in the Big Book and/or Russian contemporary literature in general, do run Natalya’s article through Google Translate: I tested and it generates a surprisingly readable English-language translation. Some of Natalya’s other Facebook Friends commented that it was brave of her to write the piece.

On some level, I’d love to keep things simple and say I don’t know why I can’t let this go. But I know exactly why I can’t let it go. It’s because I care about Russian contemporary fiction. I particularly care about books (of any genres and written in any languages) that are written well, that read well, and that keep all kinds of readers reading. And Big Book is, according to many Russian colleagues, the one Russian literary award that tends to raise awareness and sales for current Russian literature. Yes, I’m an outsider and no, Russian isn’t my first language, but I read enough contemporary Russian fiction to say that this year’s shortlist simply doesn’t feel representative of the creative range of current literary fiction that even I can observe, from a distance, acquiring books without the possibility of visiting a Russian bookshop and flipping through printed pages. (Caveat: I have a harder time assessing nonfiction.)

Since most awards (the National Bestseller is an obvious exception) don’t release nomination lists, it’s hard to say what award committees start with when they form longlists. I do know, though, that there are at least two books on this year’s Big Book longlist – Inga Kuznetsova’s weird, utopian Intervals (previous post) and Alexander Stesin’s New York Rounds, which I read (present tense) bits of some nights and appreciate for its concise characterizations and generous doses of humanity – that I’ve enjoyed far more than many, even most, of the 2020 shortlisters. Kuznetsova and Stesin surprised me in positive ways. They made me think but they didn’t constantly force me to slog through paragraphs, even pages, of superfluous material that could/should have been edited. They balance content and formal devices, too, but what’s particularly interesting is that these two books feel utterly, utterly personal but also utterly, utterly universal and (repeating a key word!) human as they appeal to readers’ emotions and sense of wonder. As I’ve been writing, I’ve realized that if I had to choose one phrase to express what went wrong for me when attempting this year’s finalists, it’s that the majority of this year’s finalists failed to generate a sense of wonder (there’s my phrase!) because they felt too predictable, wooden, and/or contrived to touch me emotionally and/or intellectually. That’s what I want from literature. Creative use of form and content to generate wonder, emotional reactions, and thought. Your wonder may not be quite the same as mine but there are many books, such as Kibirov’s, where I can recognize successful elements and understand (or at least imagine) someone else’s wonder even if I don’t share it.

Well, that was cathartic! I think I feel like I can let this go now, particularly since I realize that I’m right back where I started: reading as broad a range of books as possible, many of them written by women, to find books with enough heart, soul, structure, and smarts to keep me reading.

Up Next: Evgeny Vodolazkin’s latest novel, about residents of an island, did not disappoint. I’m now reading Guzel Yakhina’s new historical novel, Special Train to Samarkand, which will apparently be published next year. Plus Marina and Sergey Dyachenko’s mysterious Vita Nostra. I’m enjoying both! I’ll also be posting soon about this year’s list of new translations.

Disclaimers and Disclosures: The usual. And acquaintance/involvement with certain books and/or authors mentioned in this post, including Earth.