The winner of the Russian Booker prize was announced Wednesday night at a news conference in the Golden Ring hotel. The prize went to Alexander Illichevsky for his novel "Matisse" published earlier this year in Novy Mir, one of the country's most venerable literary journals.

The novel describes the odyssey of an engineer called Korolyov who is forced into a hobo lifestyle by certain circumstances. Having befriended a woman with religious mania and a mentally challenged man, Korolyov roams the gutters of Moscow and later the vast expanses of southern Russia in search of something better. (He is secretly hoping to reach Jerusalem.)

The book is full of less than glamorous features of everyday life -- unscrupulous cops, teenage gangs, a community of Vietnamese laborers and a psychiatric hospital located in a former church. The title of the book alludes to the protagonist's wish to possess a painting like a "cube of airy space" by Henri Matisse.

The jury chairman, poet and translator Asar Eppel, said the jury members were torn between "Matisse" and "Needle's End," a short novel by Yury Maletsky.

Maletsky wrote a metaphysical book about the last days of Galya Abramovna, an 87-year-old former dentist. The collapse of her physical existence opens up a plethora of past recollections and deep, unsettling thoughts about the nature of death. The critics applauded the author's stylistic craftsmanship and tactful treatment of religious issues.

Another contender was Lyudmila Ulitskaya with her pseudo-documentary novel "Daniel Stein, Translator." Ulitskaya has been severely criticized (by Maletsky, among others) for trivializing the deep religious and dogmatic problems she wrote about, but the book has been a huge commercial success.

Ulitskaya recently won the Big Book prize, worth six times as much as the Booker's $20,000, so her victory seemed unlikely. The other contenders were Andrei Dmitriyev with "Bay of Joy," Igor Sakhnovsky with "The Man Who Knew Everything" and Alex Tarn with "God Doesn't Play Dice."

Jury members said most of the novels submitted for the prize started well but slacked off toward the end. Oleg Zaionchkovsky lamented the sorry state of some of the submissions: "Most would have seriously benefited from an editor; some from a proofreader." Others expressed similar views. The shortlist, however, seemed to raise no such objections.

The Russian Booker prize used to be sponsored by Mikhail Khodorkovsky's Open Russia foundation. It is now supported by BP.