Forbid, lads, Kona – Picture of the Day – Kommersant

It is unlikely that the descendants of the 2022 literary year will be remembered for something special. Most likely, this date for them will be associated with other events. But, although the big is seen at a distance and the descendants, respectively, know better, from today’s day you can also try to discern something. At the literary and near-literary process of the year, he trained farsightedness Mikhail Prokov.

The general impression will probably be this: the writers wrote this year no worse and no better than last year or the year before. But it was forbidden, declared and signaled both to them and their curators much more cheerfully.

The leaders of the book market were the first to resort to administrative measures: Stephen King, Joan Rowling and Yu Nesbø announced their refusal to publish in Russia. For those who write in Russian, the past year has made the Russian book market almost uncontested, so it is not surprising that Ludmila Ulitskaya, Dmitry Bykov (recognized as a foreign agent in July 2022) and Boris Akunin, who left the country (this year or earlier), did not follow this example. Boris Akunin was even the first in the LitRes rating in terms of profit received in 2022. And, although the president of Eksmo-AST, Oleg Novikov, noticed in interviewthat the buyer in the book market behaves differently than in the beer or buckwheat market: he “does not buy something just to read”, and Stephen King’s novels cannot be replaced by books by Sergei Lukyanenko or Zakhar Prilepin, yet “A Month Beyond the Rubicon » Sergey Lukyanenko became the most popular novelty in the LitRes rating in 2022, taking sixth place in the overall list of sales leaders. The top ten included two more works by the same author: “Summer of the Volunteer” (9th place) and “Three Days of Indigo” (10th). And in terms of profits, Lukyanenko is second behind Boris Akunin. For Zakhar Prilepin, the year was also not in vain: not only did he, breaking the protracted silence, publish a new book – a biography of Mikhail Sholokhov, he happened to become one of the initiators of the creation of the Group for the Investigation of Anti-Russian Activities in the Sphere of Culture (GRAD) under the State Duma. So far, the group’s activities have focused on the stage and the theater (although the robotics exhibition has not yet been lucky), but this does not mean that Stephen King and Boris Akunin can relax.

Moreover, literature for adults – albeit in popular, that is, from an academic point of view, not quite serious genres – in the ratings of the expiring year came on the heels of literature for adolescents and youth, the so-called Young Adult.

In the first half of the year, the novel by Katerina Silvanova and Elena Malisova “Summer in a Pioneer Tie” continued to beat sales records, and in the second half of the year, teenage literature did not want to give up its positions. Suffice it to say that according to the results of the “Book Challenge” of the LiveLib website (a challenge where participants themselves outline a list of books and report how many and which of them they managed to read before the end of the year) in the top five most popular writers along with King, Rowling and Agatha Christie included a Russian woman living in Korea, writing under the pseudonym Leah Arden, and the top five most “read” texts are three (!) of her works: two from the series “Mara and Morok” and the third, “The Bride of November,” from a new cycle that develops plot, known from the fairy tale by Samuil Marshak “Twelve Months”.

But the settlement crept up to the writers from a different, moral side: the law, adopted a month ago, began to bear fruit. law prohibiting propaganda of “non-traditional sexual relations”. “Summer in a Pioneer Tie” was removed from the Ozon and Labyrinth catalogs. In addition, these services have hidden an unnamed “part of the books” to check for compliance with the law. LitRes warned the authors that they would ask them to make changes to the texts, and the Ridero publishing house launched a neural network check of books: everything that falls under the definition of “LGBT topics” will be removed from sale. “There are currently about a thousand authors who themselves asked us to remove books,” Maria Revina, director of production at the publishing house, told Kommersant.

Well, the process of de-traditionalization was crowned by the “list of books intended for removal from Moscow libraries” that was circulated a week ago on the net.

It included the works of Haruki Murakami, Stephen Fry, Eduard Limonov and even the Soviet sexologist Igor Kon. Vasily Rozanov’s “People of the Moonlight” was also included in the list – which is especially valuable against the background of the assurances of the initiator of the new law, deputy Alexander Khinshtein, that censorship does not threaten Russian classics. The Moscow government promptly declared the list to be either a fake, or someone’s amateur performance – however, rumors about the ongoing “optimization” of the work of the capital’s libraries do not subside.

A certain number of writers (including Bykov, Akunin and Ulitskaya mentioned here) began to be “obscured” in bookstores – for example, according to media reports, in the Moscow House of Books on Novy Arbat it was forbidden to put books of these authors (as well as Alexei Polyarinov) in a prominent place , Dmitry Glukhovsky and Andrey Makarevich – the last two this year were, like Bykov, recognized as foreign agents). That said, a 25% increase in the price of paper books seems to allow most Russian publishers to end the year in a good mood. At least those of them who, according to the law on gay propaganda, will not fall for fines and suspension of activities.

This review could have ended. Artistic events remained outside of it: a new novel by Eduard Verkin (see about him “Kommersant” No. 180 of September 29, 2022) is undoubtedly one of the strongest texts of the last decade, poems that condemned the special operation of Alexander Kabanov from Kiev and Irina Evsa from Kharkov or Anna Dolgareva (also from Kharkov) and Dmitry Melnikov from Moscow who supported her, in general, the reaction that the events of this year caused in poetry and which attracted to this form of literary creativity, almost forgotten by a wide audience, the attention of readers, critics and – in which it is absolutely impossible to believe – central television. The three winners of the Big Book remained unlisted – there just wasn’t even a shadow of scandal and some kind of confrontation, the reasons for the suspension of the activities of National Best, Grigoryevka and the Korney Chukovsky Prize remained unnamed (however, it’s not difficult to guess about them).

We repeat that, most likely, the year will not be remembered for this. But much of this will also be remembered, it will simply enter other, more specialized chronicles: cultural and political, book market, literary and everyday, purely literary. The latter is special: it has its own countdown, and indeed “Stalin is a politician of the Mandelstam era.”

Whose era will the current political leaders be – Dmitry Bykov, Sergei Lukyanenko, Anna Dolgareva?

Again, this is up to posterity. True, many of them already live among us and, apparently, read Agatha Christie and Leah Arden. But in a fair competition, everyone will have a chance, even Stephen Fry. In the end, no one has yet canceled parallel imports.