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Oleg Zaionchkovsky
In the three years since his first book was published, Oleg Zaionchkovsky (b. 1959) has gained the widespread admiration of critics and readers alike, a fact which appears to have taken the author himself by surprise. Until his recent move to Moscow, Zaionchkovsky had spent his entire adult life in the small town of Khotkovo, outside the capital, where he met his future wife at school at the age of thirteen, and where he worked as a metal worker and electrical engineer before trying his hand at prose at his wife's insistence. The result was Sergeev and the Little Town (Sergeev i gorodok, 2005), a book of short stories describing small-town byt (daily life). Marketed by its publishers, OGI, as a novel, it was immediately short-listed for the Russian Booker Prize.
Petrovich came out that same year. Taking the reader through Petrovich's childhood and adolescence, it prompts comparison with other treatments of early life in the Russian literary tradition (by Lev Tolstoy, Sergei Aksakov and others).
Regarding his influences and style, Zaionchkovsky told Novaya gazeta in 2005: ‘In sound, my writing is close to the classical Russian tradition - perhaps simply because that tradition is most organically connected to the Russian language as I feel it. I'm always arguing with my mother-in-law, for example, for not cooking spaghetti properly - she breaks them first. A sentence is broken (not ‘properly cooked') in just the same way by a style that's been formed by translated literature. [...] In fact, I'm not following or rejecting anyone; I have the sense that my literature begins with me.'
Translation rights for Zaionchkovsky's books are held by the publishers. OGI editor Vladimir Kukushkin may be contacted at vk@polit.ru
Aleksei Ivanov
Aleksei Ivanov was born in the city of Perm, in the Urals, in 1969. After studying journalism and art history at Ekaterinburg, he returned to Perm (and lives there to this day). Travels in the Urals and the surrounding taiga led to employment as a tour guide in the mid-1990s, the founding of a local museum, and the compiling of a guide-book to the Chusovaya - the river that runs through Gold of the Rebellion.
Despite the numerous linguistic obstacles thrown up by his novels, especially in their opening sections, Aleksei Ivanov has enjoyed phenomenal popular and critical success in the past five years. In his two breakthrough ‘historical' novels of adventure and fantasy, Heart of the Taiga (Serdtse Parmy, 2003) and Gold of the Rebellion, or Down the River of Gorges (Zoloto bunta, ili vniz po reke tesnin, 2005, 704pp), Ivanov gives full expression to his fascination with local lore and its relation to Russian history. By contrast, The Geographer who Drank Away his Globe (Geograf globus propil, 2003) and Cheap Porn (the English title given by Ivanov's agents to the untranslatable Bluda i MUDO, 2007) have belied Ivanov's reputation as the kraeved (local historian) from Perm.
Ivanov considers his literary roots to lie not in the genre of historical novels but in that of fantasy. In an interview with the writer Zakhar Prilepin, Ivanov observed: ‘In general I fail to see how one can write a novel "about history". One might as well write "about gravity". The historical genre grew in me from the genre of the fantastic. A good fantasy writer paints a credible picture of the world he has invented. But this task struck me as too easy. Far more interesting to paint a credible picture in which you inscribe reality itself - whether of the past or the present.'
Foreign rights for Ivanov's works are handled by the Goumen&Smirnova Literary Agency (www.gs-agency.com). Further information on Ivanov (in Russian) may be found at www.arkada-ivanov.ru
Dina Rubina
Dina Rubina was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan in 1953, studied music in the Tashkent Conservatory, moved to Moscow in the mid-1980s, and then to Israel in 1990. She returned to Russia for three years at the turn of the 21st century as Israel's cultural liaison, and now resides in a suburb of Jerusalem.
Rubina is one of the most widely read Russian writers of today. Her recent novel, On the Sunny Side of the Street (Na solnechnoi storone ulitsy), won first place in Russia's Radio Booker Literary Award (2007), third place in the Big Book Literary Prize (2007), and was short-listed for the Russian Booker (2006). Her dozens of other books include the novels The Syndicate (Syndikat, 2004) and Here Comes the Messiah! (Vot idet Messiya!, 1996), and the collection On Upper Maslovka (Na Verkhnei Maslovke, 2001). Her newest novel is Leonardo's Handwriting (Pocherk Leonardo, 2008).
Her work has won awards in Uzbekistan, Israel, and France, and has been translated into 12 languages. Her novel, Here Comes the Messiah!, is available in English translation by Daniel M. Jaffe, as are several of her shorter pieces.
More information about Dina Rubina, including English-language interviews and translation samples, can be found on her website, www.dinarubina.com/english, and that of her agent, Elena Kostioukovich, who represents Rubina worldwide (except in France, Israel and Russia) : www.perevod.it/elkost/dina_rubina
German Sadulaev
Born in 1973 to a Chechen father and Russian mother, German Sadulaev grew up in the Chechen town of Shali. At sixteen, before the first Chechen war, he left to study law at Leningrad State University. He lives in St Petersburg.
Sadulaev's first book Radio Fuck (AST, 2006) told the city tales of the thirty-something generation in St Petersburg. His second work I am a Chechen! (Ya -Chechenets!, Ultra Kultura, 2006, 288 p) Sadulaev describes as a Chechen Book of the Dead. A lyrical fusion of exotic legends, stories and memories, it was highly acclaimed and nominated for the National Bestseller Prize. Sadulaev's latest book Snowstorm, or the Myth of the End of the World (Purga, ili mif o kontse sveta, Vagrius, 2008) is a grotesque fantasy satire about social Darwinism. His novel Tablet (Tabletka, Ad Marginem) comes out in April 2008. "Only art has the magic power to convey the insight that all life forms in this universe are one." German Sadulaev.
World English Rights: under offer (Subagent: Anna Gunin. ag.russian@tiscali.co.uk)
Spain: Siglo XXI de España Editores
Switzerland: Ammann Verlag
Other rights: Literary Agency Galina Dursthoff
Dmitry Novikov
Dmitry Novikov, born in 1966, began writing prose in his early thirties, after studying medicine at university and then entering business. He lives in Petrozavodsk, Karelia. In 2007 he received the New Pushkin Prize for his third book of stories, Longing (Vozhdelenie, 2005, 320pp). ‘The Toads of Revenge and Conscience', which reflects the author's love of the North, and especially the White Sea, is taken from this collection.
The New Pushkin Prize is awarded for ‘the innovative development of native cultural traditions', but Novikov himself is disinclined to overstate the formal novelty of his writing, commenting that: ‘Unfortunately, the people we call postmodernists are carried away by method and forget about essence, but for literature essence is more important than method. Method, i.e. form, does matter, but it emerges in the process of the creation of a work, not artificially' (interview with the newspaper Stolitsa na Onego).
Of his chosen genre, Novikov says: ‘A short story cannot be made up, or it becomes feeble belles-lettres; it must be lived, killed, and spat out onto the page. It should smell of sweat, blood and sperm, and only then is it real' (interview with Kultura).
A number of substantial interviews with Novikov are gathered on the site www.litkarta.ru
Novikov's homepage: http://novikovtext.onego.ru
Aleksei Slapovsky
One of the most versatile of post-Soviet writers, Aleksei Slapovsky (b. 1957) has flourished in the new cultural habitat described by his narrator, A.N. Anisimov. As a novelist, Slapovsky occupies a seemingly permanent slot on the shortlists for all literary prizes; as a screenplaywriter and dramatist, he has reached millions of viewers in Russia and abroad, through his script for the sequel to Eldar Ryazanov's classic comedy, Irony of Fate (1975).
All Slapovsky's creative work is of a piece, displaying a fertile tendency towards cross-‘adaptation', but the author himself attaches particular significance to his novels (the complete absence of which in English translation is as remarkable as it is distressing). They include: The First Second Coming (Pervoe vtoroe prishestvie, 1993), which adapts the Gospel narrative to the life of a provincial Russian and has been singled out by many critics for particular praise; The Day of Money: A Picaresque Novel (Den' deneg. Plutovskoi roman, 1999), set in the author's native town of Saratov, like many of Slapovsky's works; and two novels that focus on the glamourous and less than glamourous aspects of contemporary (and often criminal) Muscovite society: Quality of Life (Kachestvo zhizni, 2004, 220pp) and They (Oni, 2005). His most recent novel is The Phoenix Syndrome (Sindrom feniksa, 2007).
Further information may be found on the site of Slapovsky's agent, Daria Otavina, who holds the translation rights for all the author's work: www.otavina.com
The author's home-page is www.slapovsky.ru
Irina Polyanskaya
Irina Polyanskaya (1952-2004) was the most autobiographical of recent Russian writers, as well as one of the most accomplished. Repelled by the impersonality of history as studied in schools or described in books, she focussed instead on the human past of her family and on family life in general, her view of which was anything but sentimenal.
Polyanskaya was born in 1953, and spent her early years in the ‘Zone' in the Urals, where her convict father was put to work as a scientist. She trained as an actress, studied music, and later attended the Literary Institue in Moscow. For many years, her literary output was largely confined to the genre of the short story, but her last years (before illness cut short her life) brought the publication of several longer works, including The Passing of the Shade (Prokhozhdenie teni, 1997) and The Reading Water (Chitayushchaya voda, 2001). The thread of music runs through the first; cinematic motifs dominate the second.
In his obituary, Andrei Nemzer wrote of Polyanskaya's writing: ‘Rhythmic and musical phrasing, a composition that is regulated by and arranged according to a play of motifs now converging, now branching out away from each other, a wealth of unexpected associations, the ability to see the present day and at the same time remember yesterday in its fullness and multicoloured liveliness - all this was subordinated to the author's main thought, which strove to open up and establish a human (which is to say free and creative) beginning in an illusory and cruel world without freedom.'
Aleksandr Ilichevsky
Aleksandr Ilichevsky was born in Sumgayit, near Baku, in 1970. A graduate of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, he worked in research in Israel and the United States from 1991 to 1998, and has lived in Moscow since 1998. Ilichevsky's published prose works include Klein's Bottle (Butyl'ka Kleina, 2005), and the novel Matisse (2007). ‘The Sparrow', which is included in Klein's Bottle and received the prestigious Yury Kazakov short story prize in 2005, is devoted to the famine which followed the introduction of grain requisitioning by the Soviet government in 1932 and which is thought to have killed some five million peasants. Matisse, by contrast, gives a panoramic picture of Moscow and Russia in the 1990s, taking as its protagonists two vagrants and a physicist who decides to join their number. Despite puzzling many readers and critics with its title, it was awarded the Russian Booker Prize in 2007.
‘In my view,' Ilichevsky has commented, ‘all prose should follow the laws of poetry. That's not to say that everything needs to be forced into rhythmic periods or blank verse. No, the main thing is that the entire story should contain the same depth and inexplicability as a poem' (interview for Knizhnoe Obozrenie).
Dmitry Bykov
Dmitry Bykov was born in Moscow in 1967. He studied at the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University, and journalism is among the many varied facets of his career to date: he writes for the magazine Ogonek and other publications, and appears regularly in the mass media.
Bykov is equally prolific in his literary work, having published five novels, the biography of Pasternak from which the above excerpt is taken (Boris Pasternak, 2005, 890pp), and two collections of stories. He is also the author of three volumes of essays, and numerous collections of poems, in which critics have noted the evident influence of Bykov's biographical subject. His work has attracted an array of literary prizes, including the Big Book prize for Pasternak which, despite being published in a venerable series of weighty biographies, is far from academic in tone. Unconventional both in its structure and its interpretations, Pasternak also rehearses arguments about the cyclical nature of Russian history that are characteristic of Bykov's novels. The latter include Justification (Opravdanie, 2001), which offers a fantastical version of the 1937 terror; Orthography (Orfografiya, 2003), an adventure novel ostensibly dealing with the orthographical reforms of 1918, but set both in the post-Revolutionary years and in the present day; Evacuator (Evakuator, 2005) a love story in terrorist-torn Moscow between an ordinary girl and an alien; and ZhD (2006), a futuristic anti-utopia described on its cover as ‘the most politically incorrect book of the new millennium'.
In defence of his provocative writings, Bykov explains that he has no desire to attract attention to himself, but that he enjoys expressing his opinions and in so doing hopes to extend the bounds of public tolerance. In his free time, he likes nothing better than to spend time at the dacha and go mushroom-gathering.
One of Bykov's short stories, ‘Christ's coming', may be read in a recent issue of Glas entitled War&Peace (2006), together with a translated excerpt from ZhD.
Bykov's official agent is the FTM Agency: www.litagent.ru; email: ftm@litagent.ru
Vladimir Sharov
A historian of medieval Russia by training, Vladimir Sharov (b. 1952) is the son of a geneticist who turned to writing prose, for children and adults, in the 1960s. Sharov himself began writing fiction in the late 1970s, but it was not until the 1990s that his highly unusual historiosophical novels came before the public gaze. In so doing, they caused genuine acrimony and controversy among influential editors of the literary journals (especially Novyi mir). Many were appalled both by Sharov's literary method and by his exploration through fiction of the mythological and religious substrata of Russian (and especially Revolutionary) history and thought - in particular, of its Utopian, eschatological, and messianic tendencies. Undeterred, Sharov has continued in his distinctive groove, writing, in the opinion of many critics (some of whom now consider him a ‘living classic') one and the same book: an ongoing commentary on philosophy, history, and the sacred texts. In these complex meditations, the views of the author himself remain elusive.
According to the scholar Thomas Epstein, Sharov's ‘combination of playfulness and seriousness, of parody and lyric, and of the sacred and profane not only complicates the reader's interpretive task but also suggests that Sharov has assimilated, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, the artistic and philosophical legacy of both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of Russian literature [...] Like Dostoevsky, he is excessive not in order to deny, misrepresent, or flee reality but, rather, to capture it more accurately.'
Sharov has described himself, in an interview with Moskovskie novosti, as a realist, and ridicules the notion that he is an author of ‘para-historical' fiction, arguing that there is a real history which is not the history of facts and events and which does not find its way into school textbooks. He points to the industrious scientific research conducted in the 1920s to create a ‘new man' and to raise the dead: ‘hundreds of people were engaged in this in secret institutes, and the government did not consider them mad. God judges us not only for our actions, but also for our intentions. I write the entirely real history of thoughts, inventions, and beliefs. This is the country that existed. This is our own madness, our own absurd.'
Translation rights to The Raising of Lazarus (Voskreshenie Lazarya, 2003, 365pp) are held by the author, as are those to Sharov's other six novels, with the exception of Rehearsals (Repetitsii, 1997), rights to which belong to the French publishers Actes Sud.