Dmitry Novikov

 

Дмитрий Новиков

 

Why Novikov?  It's very simple: he can write... - Andrei Bitov 

 

Biography 

Dmitry Novikov, born in 1966, began writing prose in his early thirties, after studying medicine at university and then entering business. He lives in Petrozavodsk, Karelia. In 2007 he received the New Pushkin Prize for his third book of stories, Longing (Vozhdelenie, 2005, 320pp). ‘The Toads of Revenge and Conscience', which reflects the author's love of the North, and especially the White Sea, is taken from this collection.

 

The New Pushkin Prize is awarded for ‘the innovative development of native cultural traditions', but Novikov himself is disinclined to overstate the formal novelty of his writing, commenting that: ‘Unfortunately, the people we call postmodernists are carried away by method and forget about essence, but for literature essence is more important than method. Method, i.e. form, does matter, but it emerges in the process of the creation of a work, not artificially' (interview with the newspaper Stolitsa na Onego).

 

Of his chosen genre, Novikov says: ‘A short story cannot be made up, or it becomes feeble belles-lettres; it must be lived, killed, and spat out onto the page. It should smell of sweat, blood and sperm, and only then is it real' (interview with Kultura).

 

Bibliography

 

Вожделение (Lust)

Moscow, Vagrius, 2005

 

Муха в янтаре (The Fly in Amber)

St.P, Gelikon Plus, 2003

 

Танго Карельского перешейка (The Tango of the Karelian Isthmus)

St.P, Gelikon Plus, 2001 

 

Contact

For interviews with Novikov see www.litkarta.ru

Novikov's homepage