Awards, Awards, Awards! (Pushkin’s Ghost Is Everywhere…)

A flurry of award activity crept up on me this week…

First off, critic Irina Rodnianskaia won this year’s Solzhenitsyn Prize. Rodnianskaia has been writing as a critic since 1956.

A little later in the week, Tatyana Tolstaya won the Belkin Award—which recognizes fiction that’s not to short and not too long—for “Лёгкие миры” (“Light Worlds,” perhaps?), which she wrote for the magazine Snob. Maksim Osipov won Belkin’s “teachers’ jury” award for his Кейп-Код (Cape Cod); that jury was composed of high school teachers and upperclassmen. The other writers on this year’s Belkin shortlist were: Ilya Boiashov for Кокон (Cocoon), Iurii Buida for Яд и мед (Poison and Honey), and Denis Dragunskii for Архитектор и монах (The Architect and the Monk). I’ve only read Buida’s Poison and Honey, which I wrote about last week, here. Two other awards—each named for a story in Pushkin’s Belkin Tales—were also given: Yana Zhemoitelite won the “Squire’s Daughter” award for Недалеко от рая (Not Far from Paradise) and Aleksandr Kirov won the prize called “The Shot” for his Давай расстанемся на лето (Let’s Say Goodbye/Part for the Summer).

Finally, Academia Rossica announced the shortlist for the 2014 Rossica Prize for translation. I’ll list the nominees alphabetically by translator surname; the entire Rossica Prize longlist is online here.

Anthony Briggs for The Queen of Spades, a collection of works by Alexander Pushkin that includes the title story, “The Stationmaster,” “The Bronze Horseman,” and a selection of excerpts and poems. I’ve always particularly loved “The Queen of Spades.” Publisher: Pushkin Press, appropriately enough!

Andrew Bromfield for Happiness Is Possible, a translation of Oleg Zaionchkovsky’s Счастье возможно, a book I enjoyed very much several years ago. Publisher: And Other Stories.

Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Sibelan Forrester, Anna Gunin and Olga Meerson for Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. This sounds like a wonderful anthology of stories: you really can’t go wrong with Pushkin, Platonov, Teffi, and Bazhov. Publisher: Penguin Classics.

Peter Daniels for his translation of Selected Poems by Vladislav Khodasevich. Publisher: Angel Classics (UK)/The Overlook Press (US).

Angela Livingstone for Phaedra; with New Year’s Letter and Other Long Poems, a collection of poems by Marina Tsvetaeva. Publisher: Angel Classics.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that the judges for this year’s Rossica Prize are Donald Rayfield, Andrew Kahn, and Oliver Ready. And that the award ceremony will be held on March 20 at The London Library; Oliver Ready, a past Rossica winner himself, whose new translation of Crime and Punishment was just released, will speak about “Cat and Mouse with Dostoevsky: The Translator as Detective.” I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that the Rossica Award event is listed on Academia Rossica’s schedule for yet another busy Slovo Festival, which will open on March 8 with a talk from Mikhail Shishkin on “Gogol’s Dead Souls and Living Noses.” If only I had an unlimited travel budget!

Disclaimers: The usual.

Up Next: List of new translations for 2014. Alexey Motorov’s Юные годы медбрата Паровозова, fictionalized autobiography that won the 2013 NOSE reader prize. When the book was shortlisted for NOSE, I wrote that it sounded like “very decent mainstream”… and I’m now finding out I was correct.

More News on Awards: Belkin Short List & NatsBest Long List

The Belkin Prize, which recognizes long stories/novellas, announced its short list last week, something I somehow missed—we’ll just blame that on blizzard preparations—until I saw a post on the blog known as Заметил просто.

Almost all the Belkin finalists are new to me—the jury, led by Yury Buida, skipped over known nominees like Zakhar Prilepin and Roman Senchin—but virtual introductions are what endeared Belkin to me in the first place. Something else to like: all the nominated works are available on Журнальный зал. (Заметил просто made things easy for me by including all the links in his post.) The winner will be named during Maslenitsa in the atrium of the Pushkin Museum. If you, like me, aren’t up on your Maslenitsa calendar, it’s March 11-17 this year. Meaning it’s almost time for some bliny.

Here’s the Belkin short list in Russian alphabetical order, by surname:

Dmitrii Vereshchagin’s Заманиловка (Oh my… never a dull moment with titles. The title word, zamanilovka, was new to me: it can refer to exaggerations, often inflated advertising claims intended to lure someone in, so perhaps something like “bait and switch” or “scam” could work, depending on context. A couple of online dictionaries list it as “teaser,” though that sounds milder than the slang dictionary I checked… and the uses in the story seem, at least on first glance, to vary. Anyway, this novella begins with Stalin appearing in the narrator’s dream…)

Dmitrii Ishchenko’s Териберка (Teriberka, a geographical name, ha!, for a small town on the shore of the Barents Sea. This sounds like my kind of geographical setting.)

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Irina Povolotskaia’s Пациент и Гомеопат (The Patient and the Homeopath)

Gennadii Prashkevich’s Упячка-25 (Upyachka-25… yet another quirky one! Upyachka is the name of painfully stupid Russian Web site… “upyachka” is even listed on Urban Dictionary, with two definitions.)

Vladimir Kholodov’s Шанс (Chance, I’ll go with the easiest possible translation, the path of least resistance after Upyachka.)

Meanwhile, in The Land of the National Bestseller Award, there are so many titles on the long list that I could just cherry-pick the ones that are easy to translate! I’ll mention a few… First off, it’s easy to notice that Eduard Limonov’s В Сырах (In Syry) was nominated more times than any other book. Three. Limonov, who’s pretty well-known thanks to decades of writing and rabblerousing, isn’t exactly in need of a National Bestseller award to “wake up famous.” I noticed two other writers with more than one nomination: Platon Besedin for Книга греха (The/A Book of Sin) and Olga Novikova for Каждый убивал (Each One Killed). Two books are already on my shelf: Yevgenii Vodolazkin’s Лавр (literally Laurel but known as Brother Laurus for translation purposes) and Igor Savelyev’s Терешкова летит на Марс (Tereshkova is Flying to Mars, which is coming out in Amanda Love Darragh’s translation this year, from Glas, as Mission to Mars). There are also a few writers I’ve read before: Viktor Martinovich was nominated for Сфагнум (Sphagnum, which I never realized was spelled quite this way in English, thanks, NatsBest…) and Il’ia Boiashov was nominated for Эдем (Eden). And I’ve read one story in Alexander Snegirev’s collection, Чувство вины (Guilt Feeling/Feeling of Guilt): “The Internal Enemy,” which I summed up here. Beyond those names and a few I’d heard of but never read or read very little of—e.g. Igor Sakhnovskii, Vladimir Kozlov, Anna Matveeva, and Sergei Nosov—around half the list is new to me.

For more on NatsBest: the long list, the nominator list, and commentary from NatsBest head Viktor Toporov that, among other things, notes a revenge of the complex over the simple. And a near absence of nonfiction. Yes, I’ve way oversimplified. The short list will be out on April 16 and the winner will be named on June 2.

Disclaimer: The usual.

Up Next: Mikhail Butov’s Freedom. Then Grigory Danilevsky’s Princess Tarakanova, probably together with Vasily Grossman’s Armenian Sketchbook.

Awards, Awards, Awards, January 2011 Edition

The end of the week brought announcements on several Russian literary awards:

The 2011 NOSE Award went to Vladimir Sorokin for Метель (The Blizzard). A jury and experts publicly debated three finalists – The Blizzard, Pavel Nerler’s The Word and “Deed”, and Viktor Pelevin’s T – but lenta.ru reported that viewers chose the winner because the vote was tied after the jury and experts voted. Though I’m not a big fan of The Blizzard (previous post), I think its many literary references give it a certain homey appeal. I posted brief descriptions of NOSE Award longlisters here.

The Yury Kazakov Prize for best short story of the year went to Maksim Osipov for “Москва-Петрозаводск” (“Moscow-Petrozavodsk”), published in the journal Знамя. Osipov’s collection, Грех жаловаться (which I like thinking of as Can’t Complain), which looks like it mixes fiction and nonfiction, has been nominated for other awards, including the afore-mentioned NOSE Award. Other shortlisters for the Kazakov prize were Iurii Buida, Alisa Ganieva, Artur Kudashev, and German Sadulaev. Links to their stories are on OpenSpace.ru here.

Finally, the Belkin Prize announced the shortlist for its annual award, which recognizes the best повесть of the year. A brief digression since the “povest’” category is a little tricky: a loose translation of my Ozhegov dictionary definition calls a povest’ a narrative literary work that’s less complicated than a novel. When I write about povesti, I usually call them short novels or novellas. For reference, Sorokin’s Blizzard is a povest’ but his Oprichnik book is a novel, at least according to the books themselves. Related words include повествование/povestvovanie, which is storytelling, narrative, or narration.

So… the Belkin nominees are Anna Nemzer for Плен (Captivity), Sergei Krasil’nikov for Critical Strike (love those English titles!), Afanasii Mamedov for У мента была собака (The Cop Had a Dog), Ivan Naumov for Мальчик с саблей (The Boy with the Sabre), and Alisa Ganieva (Gulla Khirachev) for Салам тебе, Долгат! (Salaam, Dolgat!). The only writer I’ve read thus far is Mamedov, whose Фрау Шрам (Frau Scar) I enjoyed last fall (previous post). As you can see from all the links, the shortlisted works are all available online in literary journals... this is where my new electronic reader will come in very handy!