Battle of the best

On June 6th Dmitry Bykov was awarded the 2011 National Bestseller Prize (Natsbest) for his novel Ostromov, or The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, his extravagant riff on Masons, charlatans and the birth of the Soviet Union. This is Bykov’s second Natsbest award, following his 2006 triumph with Boris Pasternak. 

Pasternak also put Bykov in the running for a new award this year, the Supernatsbest, in which a jury selected the best of the last decade’s National Bestsellers. However, here Bykov lost out to a writer whose star seems very much on the rise: Zakhar Prilepin, who won the National Bestseller in 2008 with his short story collection Sin. (Read the title story in Rossica 21!) 

The ‘best of the best’ approach taken by the Supernatsbest is being echoed elsewhere, as the Russian literary establishment tries to make sense of the turbulent Noughties. (For a more lucid summary, see Lev Danilkin’s essay Kludge in Rossica 21.) Not only will this year’s Russian Booker take the form of a ‘Booker of Bookers’, choosing the best Booker-winner of the last ten years, but over at knigodum.com Bykov and Prilepin are duking it out again, this time in an online poll for the book of the decade. Prilepin’s Sankya currently leads Bykov’s Pasternak, but there is a long way to go!