Salon

It seemed that the reputation of Russia's main literary award, the Open Russia Booker Prize, couldn't possibly get any worse. But the jury managed to do the impossible last week, turning the Dec. 1 award ceremony into a series of embarrassing events.

Much has been said about the very strange shortlist the jury came up with in October. At that point, critics expected the prize to go to Anatoly Naiman's saga "Kablukov." After all, Naiman, a one-time assistant to Anna Akhmatova, was the only well-known author on the list -- and a friend of Vasily Aksyonov, the jury's chairman, to boot.

But Aksyonov was outvoted, and the prize went to 36-year-old Denis Gutsko for his book "Without a Trace" (Bez Puti-Sleda). Aksyonov was so angry that he refused to announce the winner at the ceremony, embarrassing Gutsko. Whatever his novel's shortcomings, Gutsko did not deserve remarks from the chairman like "What's the title of your book anyway? 'Without a Trace'? What kind of title is that?"

Actually, the title comes from Nikoloz Baratashvili's "Merani," the most famous Georgian poem of all time. This is quite evident to anyone who has read the book. The novel tells the story of Mitya Vakula, a Russian born in Tbilisi in the late 1960s. He speaks Russian with a light Georgian accent and does not feel accepted anywhere. The book's first part, "The Russian Speaker," is mostly about his army service, including his stint in the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. The second part is about his attempts to find his place in present-day Russian life, aggravated by a stifling provincial atmosphere, a sense of uprootedness and the hero's general unwillingness to cope.

It's not a bad book, but given the diversity of today's Russian literary landscape, the jury's choice seems strange indeed. Dozens of autobiographical novels of this kind have come out in Russia in the past decade, and Gutsko's is hardly an innovative turn of the trend. Yes, it is a moving personal story, but definitely not the novel of the year.

Adding insult to injury, the Booker committee then announced that it was parting ways with Open Russia, the foundation backed by jailed billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky that had sponsored the prize for the past four years. Open Russia is going through difficult times, what with Khodorkovsky's imprisonment, attacks in pro-Kremlin media outlets and looming new legislation that threatens the existence of NGOs. Well, the implications of dumping a friend in need are pretty clear. The winning novel is very much about that -- only in Gutsko's book, the unfaithful friend is an entire country.