The Andrei Bely Prize was under threat of closure after the death of the founder

The 2023 laureates were announced for the last time, but this is not certain

The history of the Andrei Bely Prize, founded in 1978 by Boris Ivanov, Arkady Dragomoshchenko, Viktor Krivulin and Boris Ostanin, may come to an end after the death of the last of the founders. This information was confirmed to MK by a member of the award jury, poet and translator Kirill Korchagin. But there is still hope for a continuation.

“After Ostanin’s death, we had some doubts about whether to continue or not. But this season Boris managed to take part in the work (Boris Ostanin died on September 22 of this year – I.V.). In fact, everything was decided before he left.

Before his death, Ostanin spoke with various members of the jury, and in particular with me. He knew that he would have a difficult operation. He asked some of us to take care of the prize: Natalya Azarova and Alexey Konakov – according to the Charter, we have permanent jury members and those who rotate. In fact, he delegated responsibility for the future of the project to Natalya and Alexey.

But we hoped for the best. The outcome “crushed us” very much – it was very difficult to comprehend the loss of one of the unifiers of unofficial literature and our friend.

– What was the possible way out of this hopeless situation?

– A group of laureates of past years formed the so-called Board of Trustees of the Prize. Plus Azarova and Konakov remained. The results of this season were announced in full agreement with what Boris wanted – all candidates were either considered or approved by him. It’s hard for me to say what the next season will be like. We’ll see after the awards ceremony, scheduled for January 2024.

– What can you say about the winners of this season?

– The most “loud” of the nominations is poetry, and here a decision was made that everyone had been waiting for a long time. There are figures who are very strongly associated with the Bely Prize – ideologically and aesthetically. And at the same time they did not receive the bonus for a very long time.

Danila Davydov is one of these figures, an absolutely outstanding poet, critic and researcher of literature and art. His books are not published very often, and with this decision we wanted to draw attention to the poetic component of his work. Boris Ostanin also greatly appreciated the prose of the artist Ilya Dolgov, which grew out of the description of his artistic activity.

Let us remind you that in 2023 the Andrei Bely Prize was awarded in five categories. The laureate in the “Poetry” category was Danila Davydov for his book of poems “The Unreliable Narrator”; the laureate in “Prose” was Ilya Dolgov, who works and lives in Kronstadt, for his work “#Sciaponics, the work of shadows. A poetic and practical guide to graceful plant growing.”

Nadezhda Plungyan became a laureate in the Humanitarian Research category for a long-term project studying the role of women in Russian art of the first half of the twentieth century. In the category “Literary Projects and Criticism” the literary magazine “Flags” and its editor-in-chief Mikhail Bordunovsky were awarded. The special prize “For Services to Russian Literature” was awarded to philologist Tatyana Nikolskaya, who has been studying the Russian avant-garde and its connections with the Georgian avant-garde for many decades.

Traditionally, the material content of the Prize is one ruble, a bottle of vodka and an apple as a snack.