The winners of the "Big Book" literary awards were announced Tuesday at Pashkov Dom, the official seat of the Russian National Library. "Big Book" has established itself in recent years as one of the most important literary awards in Russia. At first, everyone only looked at the huge prize money the honors came with, unheard of in the domestic award circuit (more than $100,000 for the main prize), but over the years it has become evident that the artistic merits of the winning books deserve notice, too.

It was rather obvious that Lyudmila Saraskina's biography of Alexander Solzhenitsyn would be among the winners, and the second prize indeed went to her. It has already become a Big Book tradition to favor biographers (who tend to publish their books in the long-running "Lives of Outstanding People" series by publisher "Molodaya Gvardia"), and after Solzhenitsyn's death in August this outcome became inevitable. For all the values of Saraskina's book, some critics said it was more a hagiography than a biography, with any views or events presenting Solzhenitsyn in less than perfect light being intentionally left out by the author.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the ceremony was the third prize, given to Rustam Rakhmatulin for his book "Two Moscows, or The Metaphysics of the Capital," a dense philosophical survey of Moscow's architectural destiny. It came as a surprise when the book received large numbers of votes from Internet users on the "people's choice" section of the award's site -- but, as it turns out, the professional jury was no less partial to it. In accepting the prize, Rakhmatulin said he had started his work in the mid-1990s, when market forces started to wreak havoc on Moscow's historical monuments, and that even though some of the more sinister plans were thwarted, preservation work is far from complete.

The main prize went to Vladimir Makanin and his Chechen-war-themed novel "Asan." The novel's hero, major Zhilin (a nod to Leo Tolstoy's "Prisoner of the Caucasus") leads a long-term, down-to-earth business operation in war-torn Chechnya, providing fuel to both sides of the conflict and building a house for his family somewhere in faraway, safe Russia. It is quite likely that this nonflashy book will become, and for a long time remain, the main book about the recent wars in the Caucasus.

Answering the criticism that Makanin did not go to Chechnya to research his book, the jury's chairman, acclaimed writer Andrei Bitov, retorted, "Tolstoy did not participate in the War of 1812 either."