Salon

Literary results for the outgoing year were mixed, not to say mediocre. If literary awards provide any guidance of the general picture (and given their number, in a sense they do), they reflected this situation. For example, the conservative Russian Booker Prize, whose juries have been shunning the likes of Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin since the prize's inception, suddenly went to Mikhail Yelizarov for his novel "Librarian," which depicted a countrywide struggle over the legacy of a long-forgotten, boring and fictional Soviet author whose books, supposedly, contain some kind of revelation.

"National Bestseller," went to Zakhar Prilepin for his "Boots Full of Hot Vodka." (The title is less surreal than it seems ?€” it is a well-known Russian trick for breaking in tight shoes.) Prilepin shows the audiences a new kind of hero: a very tough guy who's been through everything and yet possesses one of the most sensitive souls in the world. The author, a Chechen war veteran with a shaved skull and a promising prose writer, resembles that type himself.

Some of the other successes were less surprising. Vladimir Makanin received the largest monetary award, the Big Book Prize, for "Asan," a novel about the Chechen war. Rustam Rakhmatulin was voted No. 1 by Internet fans for his book on Moscow metaphysics and received the Big Book's third prize. Given the worries of inhabitants of both Moscow and St. Petersburg about the destruction of historical buildings in favor of office skyscrapers Rakhmatulin's success was predictable.

Both Pelevin's and Prilepin's books stress another interesting trend: the return of the short story. For a long time, publishers avoided collections of stories, saying (perhaps truthfully) that readers had no interest in the genre. This year has proven this theory wrong: the traditional Russian genre, Chekhov's favorite, is back in vogue, even though today's authors have to dress up their collections as parts of a single design to resemble a novel.

Alexander Sekatsky received the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in the prose nomination for a collection of stories: his "Two Cabinets: One of Turquoise, One of Jade," which describes 44 cases of government work and logical mistakes made in its implementation by various wizards and rulers. Sekatsky's background as an Orientalist certainly helped create this unusual book. Even if the year was not too generous with big hits, it certainly shows that Russian literary cogs and wheels continue to turn quite briskly.