There are several things worth mentioning about this season's list. First, the traditional hegemony of the novel seems to be a thing of the past: There are several collections of short stories on the list and two nonfiction books. Second, a fashionable trend seems to be the foray of literary critics into literature. After the success of Lev Danilkin's "The Man with an Egg" and Alexander Arkhangelsky's "Cut-off Price," the critic Pavel Basinsky also made his fiction debut with "Russian Novel, or The Life and Adventures of John Polovinkin," a picaresque work set in the 1990s. Finally, the award committee decided to make all the contenders' work available online and even set up a separate Internet voting, which would produce its decision independently of the jury. With ever-rising book prices, this decision is a godsend to anyone wishing to keep abreast of modern literature, especially far from the big cities, where most of the shortlisted books are unavailable.
One of the favorites for The Big Book is Lyudmila Saraskina's biography, "Alexander Solzhenitsyn." Now, after Solzhenitsyn's death, the result seems almost inevitable. It would create an interesting trend, because the first ever Big Book prize went to Dmitry Bykov for his biography of Boris Pasternak, published in the same series by Molodaya Gvardia.
Saraskina, a Dostoevsky scholar, has written a detailed and extensive biography of Solzhenitsyn -- incidentally, the first ever installment in the series to be published while the subject of the book was still alive. She worked closely with the writer and his family, and the overall result was approved by him. It is seen by many as a mixed blessing: Some claim that the genre of the book crosses the boundary between biography and hagiography. A previous extensive Solzhenitsyn biography, written in English by Michael Scammell, contained views and opinions of people who did not wholeheartedly share Solzhenitsyn's views, which led the writer to cut off his collaboration with the biographer. The book is out of print, does not cover the last 15 years of Solzhenitsyn's life, and many people who could have provided materials for an updated biography are no longer alive. It looks like we will never have a complete and multidimensional literary portrait of Solzhenitsyn. A pity.
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