Efim Liamport Booker Series - "10 tysiach funtov likha," 5-part series, Nezavisimaia gazeta, June 1994.

Source

Efim Liamport Booker Series - "10 tysiach funtov likha," 5-part series, Nezavisimaia gazeta, June 1994.

Description

A series of five articles scandalously decrying the new literary prize, imported from England, the Russian Booker.

Era

Post-Soviet

Date

1994

Annotation

In 1992, the Booker corporation, a British wholesale food conglomerate that had been operating a prestigious literary prize out of London since the 1960s, decided to open an affiliate prize in Russia. As Gerald Smith, one of the founders of the Russian Booker, recalled, “opportunities for young and unknown authors were hazy [and] the official aid of the Soviet times, on which ‘hopeful’ authors could depend, came to an end. It was precisely this situation of uncertainty that served as the reason for founding the Russian Booker.” The Russian version quickly turned into a resounding success. The first prize banquet generated significant press attention and earned the support of everyone from late-Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sinyavsky to then-Minister of Culture Evgeny Sidorov, who thanked the Booker for demonstrating how literary prizes could be funded under capitalism.
The Booker’s success was due, in no small part, to its ability to generate press attention and to spark scandal, and many post-Soviet periodicals were happy to help. In the Booker’s second year, the literary addendum to Nezavisimaia gazeta published a series of articles speculating on the prize, the candidates, and members of the jury in tones that seemed to aspire to the British tabloid tradition. One member of the jury, Viacheslav Ivanov, Liamport wrote, “is wonderfully educated, but completely out of touch with living literature,” while another, Bulat Okudzhava likely wouldn’t do the reading (“emu ne do chteniia”): “He’s an old unwell man. Even in the best of times he wasn’t a reader or a writer – a bard, in a word.” Liamport’s series was only one among many that showed that the imported literary prize brought more than capital investment into post-Soviet Russia. It also imported modes of criticism and cultural value that impacted the development of literature for years to come.

Associated People

Okudzhava, Bulat, Ivanov, Vyacheslav, Sorokin, Vladimir, Kharitonov, Mark, Petrushevskaya, Lyudmila, and Latynina, Alla

Geography: Place Of Focus

Moscow

Bibliographic Reference

Efim Liamport, "10 tysiach funtov likha," Nezavisimaia gazeta, June 1994.