Dmitry Bykov will participate in the Salisbury International Arts Festival and Hay Festival of Arts and Literature:
Friday 28 May, 11:30am
Salisbury International Arts Festival
Saturday 29 May, 1pm
Hay Festival of Arts and Literature

9 May is a very special day – Victory Day. It is particularly special for Russia, since of all countries it paid the heaviest price for its own freedom and for the freedom of other countries from fascism. This is our common victory. It became possible only thanks to the joint efforts of all allies and the struggle of those who fought against fascism in their own countries. On this day we celebrate life and freedom and commemorate those who gave up their lives for us during the World War II.

Interpreting for the Russian guests at the LBF and SLOVO festival For those interested in offering their professional translation skills during the London Book Fair and the SLOVO festival, ACADEMIA ROSSICA will have a series of events and seminars where interpreters will be needed in order for Russian and UK guests to communicate with each other. This is an excellent opportunity for professional translators to play an involved and encouraging role in the development of future publishing projects that will lead to the further promotion and distribution of Russian literature in the English speaking world. To register as an interpreter, please contact Rodrigo@academia-rossica.org by 15th April.

ACADEMIA ROSSICA's aim is to bring writers, publishers and translators together and to help create structures to support the publication and distribution of Russian literature in the English speaking world. The Translators Day will be a key element of this project, which will set the ground for a stronger recognition and promotion of literary translation from Russian into English. 10.30 – 11.30 PEN Café, EC2 Rossica Translation Prize, Young Translators Prize award. A special Rossica Translation award to Stanley Mitchell 11.30 –12.00 BFR, Y455 Russkiy Mir Translation Grants Presentation 12.00 – 13.00 BFR, Y455 Roundtable: Translating Russia 13.30 –14.30 BFR, Y455 Presentation: Famous Englishmen, Known Only in Russia Presentation: Misreading English Literature – A few true stories from Soviet translations 15.00 – 15.30 BFR, Y455 New Millennium Prize Award. Winner - Mary Hobson, poet and translator. 16.00 – 16.30 PEN Café, EC2 Market Focus Handover Ceremony, Champagne Reception Interpreting for the Russian guests at the LBF and SLOVO festival For those interested in offering their professional translation skills during the London Book Fair, ACADEMIA ROSSICA will have a series of events and seminars where interpreters will be needed in order for Russian and UK guests to communicate with each other. This an excellent opportunity for professional translators to play an involved and encouraging role in the development of future publishing projects that will lead to the further promotion and distribution of Russian literature in the English speaking world. To register as an interpreter, please contact Rodrigo@academia-rossica.org by 15th April.

The Debut Prize was instituted in 2000 by State Duma Deputy Andrei Skoch, creator of the humanitarian foundation Pokolenie (Generation). Skoch originally conceived of Pokolenie as a medical charity to help provincial Russian clinics, sick children and pensioners. The Debut, Pokolenie’s only cultural project to date, has become a prize of national renown. The Debut has a strict age limit: entrants may not be over the age of 25. Members of the Russian literary establishment were skeptical at first. They doubted that writers so young would have something to say to readers. Young writers might try their hand at poetry, they argued, but they didn’t have enough life experience to write a story or a novel. However, the Debut has shown that a person’s life experience at any age is complete in and of itself. What a person knows about the world at 20 has been forgotten by the time he is 30. What he could have written at 20 he will no longer write at 30. He will write something else. Strangely enough, most writers live without their first book: it remains in their minds, in drafts. The Debut inspires young Russian writers to complete that first book. The Debut prompts them to commit to literature their unique experience, what might be described as the shock of their first encounter with grown-up life. Not just their new existential status, but daily events. Suddenly a person is faced with bank applications, having to pay rent and buy insurance; no one will fill out the forms for him, no one will answer for him. And he suddenly feels horribly alone in the world. This sort of loneliness, like any other, has a huge creative potential. The Debut brings in the first literary harvest of the writing generation — and it does so every year. 2010 marks the first year of Debut’s international program. Funded by Pokolenie, the program aims to present the works of Debut finalists and winners to the foreign reader. Collections of these works will be translated and their authors will be sent to international book fairs and festivals. This year’s collection appears in English and Chinese. Future collections will be brought out in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and so on. Since the number of Debut finalists and winners is only increasing, as is their level and mastery, publication of their works in English will continue.

Olga Slavnikova was born to a family of aerospace engineers near Sverdlosk in the Urals, modern day Ekaterinburg. After finishing school she studied journalism and graduated from Ekaterinburg State University. Slavnikova began publishing fiction in the late 1980s (her first novel appeared in 1988), during which time she was also fiction editor, then managing editor, of the important literary magazine ‘Urals'. She has lived and worked in Moscow since 2001.

Dmitry Bykov was born in Moscow in 1967. He studied at Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism, and journalism is something he remains engaged with: he regularly produces articles, essays and reviews for the leading Russian newspapers and magazines. He has senior editorial positions in various publications, hosts a weekly radio show and appears regularly on Russian TV.

Dmitry Bykov was born in Moscow in 1967. He studied at Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism, and journalism is something he remains engaged with: he regularly produces articles, essays and reviews for the leading Russian newspapers and magazines. He has senior editorial positions in various publications, hosts a weekly radio show and appears regularly on Russian TV.

Slavnikova began publishing fiction in the late 1980s (her first novel appeared in 1988), during which time she was also fiction editor, then managing editor, of the important literary magazine ‘Urals'. She has lived and worked in Moscow since 2001.

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.

Calvert 22
13 May - 16 June 2009
Calvert 22 presents its inaugural exhibition, curated by David Thorpe. The show will bring together five leading contemporary Russian artists: Alexander Brodsky, Pavel Pepperstein, Haim Sokol, Leonid Tishkov and Stanislav Volyazlovsky. Although the artists vary greatly in terms of the chosen media of their practice, they connect via their common desire to excavate the past, to explore both collective and personal mythologies, and through the realisation of their imaginings of the future. The majority of the works in Past Future Perfect will be on show in the UK for the first time.

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).

4 September 2009, 7pm
Hammersmith Apollo
The famous Russian singer Valery Meladze with only one live performance! Tickets are now on sale! 2 weeks before, on 21 August 2009, prize draw to win free tickets to Valery Meladze concert! To take part, simple register on our website, and you will enter price draw automatically. Register to receive information about our future events.

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.”

Bykov's literary output is voluminous. He has published eight novels, biographies of Pasternak and Bulat Okudjava, several collections of short stories, three volumes of essays and eight collections of poetry. His biography of Pasternak won the National Bestseller Prize and the 2007 Big Book Prize and was a critical and commercial hit, enjoying three print runs.

Olga Slavnikova was born to a family of aerospace engineers near Sverdlosk in the Urals, modern day Ekaterinburg. After finishing school she studied journalism and graduated from Ekaterinburg State University. Slavnikova began publishing fiction in the late 1980s (her first novel appeared in 1988), during which time she was also fiction editor, then managing editor, of the important literary magazine ‘Urals'. She has lived and worked in Moscow since 2001.

Dmitry Bykov was born in Moscow in 1967. He studied at Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism, and journalism is something he remains engaged with: he regularly produces articles, essays and reviews for the leading Russian newspapers and magazines. He has senior editorial positions in various publications, hosts a weekly radio show and appears regularly on Russian TV. Bykov's literary output is voluminous. He has published eight novels, biographies of Pasternak and Bulat Okudjava, several collections of short stories, three volumes of essays and eight collections of poetry. His biography of Pasternak won the National Bestseller Prize and the 2007 Big Book Prize and was a critical and commercial hit, enjoying three print runs.

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).

Olga Slavnikova was born to a family of aerospace engineers near Sverdlosk in the Urals, modern day Ekaterinburg. After finishing school she studied journalism and graduated from Ekaterinburg State University. Slavnikova began publishing fiction in the late 1980s (her first novel appeared in 1988), during which time she was also fiction editor, then managing editor, of the important literary magazine ‘Urals'. She has lived and worked in Moscow since 2001.

Dmitry Bykov was born in Moscow in 1967. He studied at Moscow State University's Faculty of Journalism, and journalism is something he remains engaged with: he regularly produces articles, essays and reviews for the leading Russian newspapers and magazines. He has senior editorial positions in various publications, hosts a weekly radio show and appears regularly on Russian TV. Bykov's literary output is voluminous. He has published eight novels, biographies of Pasternak and Bulat Okudjava, several collections of short stories, three volumes of essays and eight collections of poetry. His biography of Pasternak won the National Bestseller Prize and the 2007 Big Book Prize and was a critical and commercial hit, enjoying three print runs.

Published in 2006, ‘2017' has been widely acclaimed. Its anti-utopian format allows Slavnikova to dip into the near future in order to survey the century which has elapsed since 1917. A beguiling mix of romance and realism, ‘2017' is enriched with the folklore of the Urals, the drama of mountaineering expeditions and the gruesome conventions of the gem industry.
Click here or on the book cover for the pdf:

by Alexander Pushkin
Translated by James E. Falen
Oxford University Press, 2007, pp.2015
'The people are silent' So ends Pushkin's great historical drama Boris Godunov, in which Boris's reign as Tsar witnesses civil strife and intrigue, brutality and misery. Its legacy is an uncertain future for the new Tsar whose inauguration is met with devastating silence by the people.

25/09 at 4.00pm
Apollo West End
A roundtable discussion on the past, present and future of documentary filmmaking. Top Russian and British filmmakers and critics will discuss the changing boundaries between documentary and fiction in contemporary film. The discussion will be followed by a screening of a new film by Vitaly Mansky ‘Virginity’ (text by Dmitry Bykov).

Bridget Kendall, the much-admired BBC diplomatic correspondent, never fails to delight and impress audiences by the clarity of her delivery and the perceptiveness of her insights into many societies and cultures from around the world, and especially on Russia. She has spent several extended periods of study in Russia as a British Council Exchange Student at Voronezh State University in 1976-77 and again in 1981-82 at Moscow State University, while reading modern languages at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She subsequently undertook postgraduate research in Soviet Studies at St Antony’s College Oxford and Harvard (USA).

14-16 April
London Book Fair, Earls Court, London
The first ever Russian stand at the London Book Fair will present books and publishing programmes of 20 leading publishers from St Petersburg and Moscow as well as a continuous 3-day programme of debates on contemporary Russian culture, politics and the future of Russo-British relations.

14-16 April
London Book Fair, Earls Court, London
The first ever Russian stand at the London Book Fair will present books and publishing programmes of 20 leading publishers from St Petersburg and Moscow as well as a continuous 3-day programme of debates on contemporary Russian culture, politics and the future of Russo-British relations.

Director of the State Russian Museum in St Petersburg since the perestroika years, cavalier of the French Legion d’Honneur award for the promotion of Russan-French cultural ties. Used to be the Chairman of St.Petersburg committee for culture under Anatoly Sobchak, at the time when other committees were headed by the future leaders of Russia, including Vladimir Putin. Ogranizer of numerous exhibitions of Russian art in Russia and overseas. Hosts a TV show about the museum.