Day 1
The first day ended with an evening with Dmitry Bykov and Bridget Kendall at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly. Bykov entertained the large audience with, along with everything else, a joke. It went like this: “At birth you get a label put on your arm, after death, it’s put on your foot. If someone gets the same number both times, they win a prize – a pressure cooker.” It seems that even those guests who were listening to the interpreter got the humour. Since as soon as they decided to come to Waterstone’s for a talk with a Russian writer, they already knew that our native literature can also be compared to the proverbial “pressure cooker”, it’s that “valuable” prize that we win just by being born.
From the very first day of Russian Literature Week, the Russian writers who had come to London were looking forward to speaking to English readers. This year our stand, organised under the direction of Svetlana Adjoubei’s cultural foundation Academia Rossica, was even better designed that last year’s: practical tables, lamps (not green, it’s true), bookcases all around... But an interested reader could see the signs of Russia’s presence in London on the way to the stand. For example, French publishers were showcasing the book ‘Russian espionage: from Stalin to Putin’, with the two corresponding portraits on the cover. A Penguin solemnly announced that it was they that would be publishing Vladimir Nabokov’s final unfinished text. The text is in fact written in English. The ties between Russia and England are becoming more and more random. The translators Alexandra Borisekova and Victor Sonkin led a Russian publisher’s presentation of Victorian detective novels at the Russian stand. And in the Thames room a seminar with the alarming title ‘Transition: Crisis / Anticrisis’ was held in English: Vladimir Grigoriev (Rospechat), Yuri Deikalo (AST) and Arkady Vitriuk (Azbuka-Atticus) preferred to get by without getting ‘lost in translation’. In a private conversation, Yuri Deikalo later compared the advance of Russian literature in England with the future of Bangladeshi literature in Russia, his pessimistic forecast could be refuted by the impressive exhibition of books that were entered for the Rossica prize.
This prize is awarded for the best translation of a Russian literary work into English: at the moment Chekhov, Pelevin, Kharms and Sorokin are in the running. Along with books that have already been translated into the language of Shakespeare are dozens of tomes awaiting their turn. The writer Olga Slavnikova surprised everyone in Domodedova airport with her large collection of bags. And although the ‘2017’ author’s impressive outfits clearly took up quite a lot of space, the majority was taken up by kilos and kilos of books. Slavnikova, along with everything else, is the director of ‘Debut’, a prize for young writers, and brought along her charges’ books with her to the fair. “I was in England right after Anna Politkovskaya’s murder, and all the questions that English journalists were asking back then were exclusively about that event.” – Slavnikova says. “People here don’t differentiate politics from culture. They think that the two are dependent on each other, but that’s not true. A writer doesn’t have to be ‘for’ or ‘against’ Putin. Putin is a subject of artistic narration just like, for example, a flowering tree.” Or, we could say “Bykov’s pressure cooker”.
