Lev Danilkin is the leading literary critic of his generation, credited with making criticism accessible and even glamorous, and is acknowledged, and feared, as the man who can make or break a book. His reviews in the popular cultural digest Afisha are noted for the breadth of their scope and the verve of their writing and are required reading for literate young Russians.

The BOOKS FROM RUSSIA stand was held at the London Book Fair for the third time by the Russian Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communication in collaboration with Academia Rossica. Building on the success of last year, publishers were offered even greater opportunities for creating and expanding business links with the fast growing Russian book market. This was of particular important this year as part of the lead up to the 2011 London Book Fair, where Russia will be the Guest of Honour. Despite being affected by the unexpected volcanic activity, as was the entire London Book Fair, we were very pleased to see that the BOOKS FROM RUSSIA stand was one of the liveliest at the fair.

Saturday, 20 November, 7.30pm
Richmond Upon Thames Literature Festival
n the year marking the centenary of Tolstoy’s death, Anne Sebba joins A.N. Wilson in discussing the fascinating diaries of Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia. These diaries are a testament to a woman of tremendous vital energy and poetic sensibility who, in the face of provocation and suffering, continued to strive for the higher things in life; to remain indomitable.

When Academia Rossica approached me to serve on the jury for their translation prize, I was excited and intrigued. What would the field be like, how many entries would there be, were there still publishers around in the West willing to produce translations of serious Russian works? The classics apart, was there more to Russian literature for English-speaking people than penguins and historical detectives? My caricature of the average Western reader's view of Russian literature today can perhaps be excused in part by my own education.

I was delighted and astonished when I received the invitation to be one of the judges of this year’s ‘Rossica’ Translation Prize. Delighted – because, by accepting, I would be able to indulge myself with a clear conscience in reading (or, as it often turned out, rereading) many works of Russian literature rather than doing what I all too often do – reading works about Russian literature (and various other things). Astonished – because I am not a prolific or high-profile translator of Russian literature, so I was unsure about why I had been chosen. However, not being known for false modesty, I did feel that I was reasonably well qualified for the work ahead.

Izbavi Bog i nas ot etakikh sudei

A few weeks ago something strange happened. Someone sent me, through the post, ten million printed words – I’ll repeat that, in case you weren’t concentrating: ten million words – nearly half of them in a difficult foreign language. I was told to get reading them.

I see Russia’s future in the brightest of hues. Admittedly, this sort of statement does not befit a dystopian writer like me, who is supposed to make dire predictions, though for some what I am going to tell you will sound as bad as an anti-utopia (while I see it as an almost ideal outcome).

I see Russia’s future in the brightest of hues. Admittedly, this sort of statement does not befit a dystopian writer like me, who is supposed to make dire predictions, though for some what I am going to tell you will sound as bad as an anti-utopia (while I see it as an almost ideal outcome).

The first day ended with an evening with Dmitry Bykov and Bridget Kendall at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly. Bykov entertained the large audience with, along with everything else, a joke. It went like this: “At birth you get a label put on your arm, after death, it’s put on your foot. If someone gets the same number both times, they win a prize – a pressure cooker.”

By Dan Carrier
Russian films do not get much in the way of publicity, and even arthouse cinemas tend not to run regular features, so it’s a pleasure to find the festival offering 10 UK premieres of Russian films that have been acclaimed on the European festival circuit.

By David Parkinson
Returning for a second year, Academia Rossica's Russian Film Festival boasts a programme of 10 London premieres that even surpasses the excellence of the inaugural slate. With several actors and directors guesting to discuss their work, this is an outstanding opportunity to assess the current state of one of the world's great film industries.

Mikhail Shishkin was born in 1961 and grew up in Moscow. He studied at the Moscow State Pedagogical Institute where he trained as a teacher. Following his graduation in 1982, Shishkin worked as a journalist at ‘Rovesnik’ and then, between 1985 and 1995, as a teacher of English and German. In 1995 he moved to Switzerland and he lives in Zurich to this day. Buoyed by Shishkin’s sophisticated language and phrases of unique melody, predictable comparisons have been made to that other writer of extraordinary linguistic versatility, Vladimir Nabokov. Though he understands himself as within a tradition of Russian writers in exile, for Shishkin, the question ‘to return or not to return to Russia’ simply does not exist. He asserts that ‘for a better understanding of the self one should live everywhere’.

Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the ‘European' side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin's love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has lived in Moscow ever since.

by Daniil Kharms
Translated by Matvei Yankelevich
Overlook Press, 2007, pp. 266
Daniil Kharms has long been heralded as one of the most iconoclastic writers of the Soviet era, but the full breadth of his achievement is only in recent years, following the opening of Kharms' archives, being recognized internationally.

by Marina Tsvetaeva
Translated by Belinda Cooke
Worple Press, 2008, pp.133
The title of this book is an attempt to show Tsvetaeva as just one of Stalin's many victims, as well as a woman driven by a single-minded pursuit of her poetic muse. The 'Beggar woman' draws attention both to her desperate poverty and literal need to beg at times and to the various hyperbolic female selves seen in the poetry.

by Larissa Miller
Translated by Richard McKane
Arc Publications, 2008, pp.132
Larissa Miller is one of Russia's most highly-regarded writers - novelist, essayist and poet - and this selection from her collection "Between the Cloud and the Pit" (1999) spans her poetic output from the 1960s to the millennium. "Guests of Eternity" is a presentation, in chronological order, of poems written (but not published) in the three decades preceding glasnost' as well as the final decade of the twentieth century.

by Andrei Babchenko
Translated by Nick Allen
Portobello Books, November 2007, pp.404
Written shortly after his discharge from the army, the book burns with the need to tell of his personal ordeal and that of his fellows as young, innocent and woefully inexperienced grunts condemned to a miserable life ruled by shell-shocked superiors and perpetual threats.

by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Robert Maguire
Penguin, 2008, pp.787
Pyotr and Stavrogin are the leaders of a Russian revolutionary cell. Their aim is to overthrow the Tsar, destroy society and seize power for themselves. Together they train terrorists who are willing to go to any lengths to achieve their goals – even if the mission means suicide. But when it seems the group is about to be discovered, will their recruits be willing to kill one of their own circle in order to cover their tracks?

by Victor Pelevin
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
Faber and Faber, 2008, pp.333
Described as "the Zen Buddhist Will Self of the former Evil Empire", Victor Pelevin is a star of contemporary Russian literature. The Sacred Book Of The Werewolf is an extraordinarily accomplished piece of contemporary writing that mashes up an assortment of genres: horror, humour, romance, fantasy, satire and post-modern self-reflexivity and sampling. The result is something that has to be classified as "high" literature, if only because of its entanglings in and borrowings from the work of Vladimir Nabokov and its deadly serious critique of contemporary Russian society under Putin.

by Various
Translated by Kirsten Lodge (poetry), Margo Shohl Rosen and Grigory Dashevsky (prose)
Dedalus Books, 2007, pp.343
The sensationalism and morbid pessimism that characterized French decadence in the late nineteenth century quickly attracted converts throughout Europe, including Russia. The Dedalus Book of Russian Decadence: Perversity, Despair and Collapse brings together horrifying, dramatic and erotic short stories and poetry, most of which have never before been translated into English, by the most decadent Russian writers.

by Alexander Pokrovsky
Translated by Noah Birksted-Breen
Glas; 2007; pp.113
Even in the absence of war, the army, anywhere, is a cruel, unsafe, and closed world, perhaps more so in Russia due to its outdated compulsory national service and poor economic conditions. Now, thanks to the growing movement of Soldiers' Mothers Committees around the country, the public is increasingly aware of the realities of life inside the army.

By Dan Carrier
Russian films do not get much in the way of publicity, and even arthouse cinemas tend not to run regular features, so it’s a pleasure to find the festival offering 10 UK premieres of Russian films that have been acclaimed on the European festival circuit.

By David Parkinson
Returning for a second year, Academia Rossica's Russian Film Festival boasts a programme of 10 London premieres that even surpasses the excellence of the inaugural slate. With several actors and directors guesting to discuss their work, this is an outstanding opportunity to assess the current state of one of the world's great film industries.

By Dan Carrier
Russian films do not get much in the way of publicity, and even arthouse cinemas tend not to run regular features, so it’s a pleasure to find the festival offering 10 UK premieres of Russian films that have been acclaimed on the European festival circuit.

By David Parkinson
Returning for a second year, Academia Rossica's Russian Film Festival boasts a programme of 10 London premieres that even surpasses the excellence of the inaugural slate. With several actors and directors guesting to discuss their work, this is an outstanding opportunity to assess the current state of one of the world's great film industries.