The Russian Booker Comes Full Circle

Yesterday was an interesting day for the Russian Booker Prize… The big news was the announcement that the Booker has no more money because its 10-year sponsorship contract with BP – yes, the BP more formally known as British Petroleum – has ended. The Booker people are looking for new financial backing. I wonder if they’re searching for another sponsor with the initials BP.

A few hours later I saw that last year’s Russia Booker winner, Elena Koliadina’s Цветочный крест (The Cross of Flowers) “won” the Полный абзац (Complete Abzats) antiprize. Abzats awards recognize “all the worst in literature” and are presented by the newspaper Книжное обозрение (Book Review) (previous post with Abzats description/definition). Among other things, the award announcement cited Koliadina’s attempt to simultaneously sit on three genre “chairs”: women’s, historical, and grotesque. AST, which published The Cross of Flowers in book form, noted that the award recognized the journal version of the novel, not the AST version. Heaven forbid! Of course that very same journal version won the Booker (previous post). Alas, the journal version of the book is no longer available online.

As someone who follows the Booker at a distance, I found the Abzats announcement about the Koliadina book more than a little amusing, an exclamation point of sorts on the Booker bankruptcy announcement. My head is feeling slow and addled by Sudafed so I’ll stop there before I turn this post into a complete abzats of a mess.

Up next: When my wits are back I’ll write about Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (Letter-Book) and Elena Chizhova’s Полукровка (Half-Breed or Half-Blood). And then Margarita Khemlin’s most recent book.

2010 Russian Booker Awarded to Koliadina

The 2010 Russian Booker Prize was awarded to Elena Koliadina today for her novel Цветочный крест (The Cross of Flowers or The Flower Cross, take your pick), about a 17th-century man of the cloth, father Loggin.

The Lenta.ru news article announcing the award notes that The Cross of Flowers generated plentiful reader reaction. In summary: Lenta mentions negative reviews criticizing Koliadina’s stylized use of old Russian language, comical eroticism, lack of feel for language, and, to top it all off, “элементарное невежество,” “basic ignorance/lack of manners.” I guess nobody should be surprised about any of this since the line under the novel’s title reads “роман-катавасия” – “novel-muddle.”

The Lenta article quotes [indirectly] Koliadina as saying she’d always wanted to write a novel about love and sex but couldn’t find the right words in contemporary Russian. That, apparently, inspired her to seek shelter in pre-Petrine Russian. The key word in the first sentence, though, is афедрон/aphedron, which apparently hails from Greece. Афедрон isn’t in my Russian dictionaries, but the Internet tells me it can mean both latrine and anus in Russian… the specific meaning quickly becomes clear on the first page of the novel. So do the stylistic peculiarities of Koliadina’s writing.

The novel is currently only available in journal form; AST will release it as a book sometime around the new year holiday. For now, find The Cross of Flowers online at the Вологодская литература (Vologda Literature) site, here: beginning middle end.

P.S.

An English-language article about the award, from Voice of Russia, with a plot summary plus comments from Booker secretary Igor Shaitanov.

Further Russian-language commentary on the book:

-Snob.ru has a brief news item about the post-award scandal, followed by lots of very interesting comments. I particularly enjoyed reading critic Aleksandr Gavrilov's critique of the novel's stylistics; he essentially says it's sloppy and overloaded, which was my impression, too, from reading the first page and some random pages further in. (Gavrilov read the whole thing.) Snob's summary notes that one article about the award, from Kommersant, mentions that the Booker's five-year contract with its sponsor -- BP! -- is ending. Kommersant writer Anna Narinskaia wonders if the award was meant as a "жест" (gesture) indicating that the Booker organizers are tired of the award. Indeed.

-A piece by Artyom Efimov on Lenta.ru, discusses the post-award scandal and plays on Koliadina's use of the word "aphedron."

-The blogger who writes as zametilprosto seemed to root most for Petrosian to win the Booker but liked Cross second-best. Zametilprosto says the book is far more focused on holiness and sin than love and sex. A commenter agreed and calls the book easy but dull/boring (скучно) reading.

-Another news article. This one has quotes from Koliadina... including how her work for Космополитен got her going on the book.

-Critic Andrei Nemzer's absolutely scathing commentary on the award and the book.