Parade of planets – Newspaper Kommersant No. 230 (7431) of 12/10/2022

The Big Book Prize announced the winners: Pavel Basinsky, Alexei Varlamov and Sergei Belyakov. For the first time in 17 times among the works of the three winners – not a single artistic text. Watched the awards ceremony Mikhail Prokov.

The beginning of the ceremony of announcing the laureates made me recall the famous poem by Annensky: “Among the worlds, in the flickering of the stars…” — exactly against such a shimmering-cosmic background, the screen placed on the stage showed portraits of Gogol, Pushkin, Chekhov and Nabokov. Last year’s ceremony, we recall, was marked by Dostoevsky and, to a lesser extent, Nekrasov; maybe that’s why their celestial bodies were not presented in the constellation-2022.

And the heavenly bodies were to be understood in the most literal sense. After the actress Alexandra Ursulyak, who played the role of host, announced the motto of the ceremony (“And the star speaks to the star”), quotes from the classics began to appear on the screen, signed both by the name of the person being quoted and by the number of the asteroid, which was given the name of the corresponding writer. The quotes were in the form of questions so that the stars of yesteryear could communicate with the stars of today. At the same time, they could be both quite famous (“My dear, what have I done to you?” Asteroid No. 3511, aka Marina Tsvetaeva, asked the finalist of the Sergey Belyakov award), and those that are not quite well known (“How good it is to light! .. But why does it hurt so much? ”- this question of Boris Pasternak, asteroid No. 3508, was addressed to the author of numerous biographies, Alexei Varlamov). In response, quotations from the works of the participants in the short list were shown and read out, and to the sound of their own words, one by one they rose to the stage.

When everyone was in the collection, the actual presentation of the prizes began. The Reader’s Choice Award, a literary blog, a new prize – “Choice of the Generation”: for a generation, students of the humanities departments of the Higher School of Economics decided everything, and the most consonant with their own situation seemed to them “Paris Boys in Stalin’s Moscow” by Sergei Belyakov, a documentary novel about Georgy Efron and his friend Dmitry Seseman. Somewhat unexpected at first was the winner of the prize “For Contribution to Literature” – the Institute of Applied Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. But Alexandra Ursulyak immediately clarified that it was the employees of this institute that many classics of Russian literature owe their own asteroids. And the astronomer and writer Leonid Yelenin, who received the prize (who personally discovered about five hundred small planets), promised that by the next presentation, the asteroid named after the prize, the Big Book, would already be officially twinkling in the sky.

After that, it was already possible to move on to the main thing – the awarding of the winners. Third place went to “Paris Boys” and Sergei Belyakov, second prize went to Alexei Varlamov and his “Name of Rozanov”. The winner was Pavel Basinsky, author of The True History of Anna Karenina.

In the history of the Big Book, the first prizes were awarded for non-fiction more than once: starting in 2005 with the awarding of Boris Pasternak by Dmitry Bykov (included by the Ministry of Justice in the list of foreign agents), the jury subsequently awarded the victory to both Lev Danilkin’s Lenin and Erofeev Oleg Lekmanov with co-authors, and Leo Tolstoy. Escape from Paradise” by the same Pavel Basinsky. But that none of the three laureates was the author of a work of art – this has never happened before. The year, of course, was fruitful in biographies – for example, the biographies of Saltykov-Shchedrin, Yaroslav Gashek and Fazil Iskander failed to migrate from a long list to a short one. But there were a lot of interesting novels, seven of them reached the final of the Big Book, of these seven one was “Sasha, hello!” Dmitry Danilov – became the laureate of the Yasnaya Polyana competition, the other – “Echelon to Samarkand” by Guzeli Yakhina – won the reader’s sympathy prize of the Big Book itself. Against this background, the presentation of all three awards to non-fiction looks like a conscious gesture – but the jury of 105 people is hardly capable of conscious gestures.

So, nevertheless, the circumstance that the Kommersant columnist had already written about a year ago played a role: books about modernity usually excite more than historical ones, fiction, as a rule, disturbs more than documentary research. Academics do not like to disturb, especially in troubled times. And the experts, by the way, are quite on the side of the academics in this matter – when forming a short list, just noticeable texts about modernity turned out to be overboard: “Stream” by Ivan Shipnigov, “Time of Risky Farming” by Daniel Orlov, “Russian Winter” by Roman Senchin. As a result, Dmitry Danilov and Ruslan Kozlov had to take the rap for modern topics in the final, and the jury, ignoring them (one had already received an important award, the other had not yet received enough titles, for the first time in the shortlist), could freely choose between historical prose and historical research – and strongly preferred the latter.

Well, it seems that the stars of the past in the person of Leo Tolstoy and Vasily Rozanov found something to discuss with the stars of the present. Yes, the Big Book awards are still adding stardom, so it will hopefully be even easier for authors of books about a great writer and an outstanding thinker to have an even easier dialogue with their favorite authors next time. Well, let descendants better deal with the description of modern life: the questions asked by the authors of books about today will just have time to reach them, reflected from asteroids.