We are as disappointed as you are that the ash cloud stopped our Russian authors from making it to the UK for our SLOVO festival. However, the festival has not been cancelled, merely postponed. We are working hard to bring the events to London at a later date, so keep a close eye on our website! In the meantime, Academia Rossica is delighted to support The East End Film Festival (22 April – Friday 30) in their focus on new Russian cinema.

Boris Ryzhy Director Aliona van der Horst NETHERLANDS/2008/BETACAM/COLOUR/59 MIN/RUSSIAN ENGLISH SUBTITLES Prize-winning documentary film by Aliona van der Horst about Russian poet Boris Ryzhy "All of my poems speak only of love and death," wrote Russian poet Boris Ryzhy (1974-2001) in 2000. "But all the same, I'm happy with my wife and son." One year later, the charming young tough, who had already achieved considerable literary renown, hanged himself-in so doing following in the footsteps of many Russian artists before him. The author of a thousand poems and recipient of Russia's most prestigious literary prize, he was only 26 years old. Trying to understand what drove him to suicide, van der Horst uncovers the hidden drama of the entire perestroika generation, for which Boris Ryzhy was the standard bearer. "We were deprived of communism without being given access to capitalism," explains his widow. The perestroika years of the Yeltsin era, a time that we in the West associate with democracy and freedom, have an entirely different meaning in the anarchic streets of Yekaterinenburg, the industrial city where Ryzhy grew up and which so marked his life and work. However, despite this dark reality, Ryzhy's love of life is what comes to the fore in van der Horst's poetic film: through his work, pain is transformed into grace.

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.

Vladimir Grigoriev is Deputy Head of the Russian Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications and he is a tireless campaigner and champion of Russian literature and culture at all the world's major book fairs: he has famously said, ‘Russian literature should know no boundaries.'

NON/FICTION 11, Stand G-2 December, 2-7. Central House of Artists Dear friends and colleagues, Academia Rossica in partnership with The London Book Fair, Federal Agency for Press and Mass Communications and British Council invite you to Russia Market Focus 2011 Stand and would be very glad to see you at various events we are running during this fair.

"Избави Бог и нас от этаких судей!" (И. Крылов)

Несколько недель назад случилось нечто удивительное. Кто-то прислал мне по почте 10 миллионов печатных слов. Я повторю на случай, если вы не обратили внимания на эту цифру: 10 миллионов слов. Большая часть из них была на сложном иностранном языке. Мне сказали прочитать их. Это было как у Гоголя: ‘марта 25 числа случилось в Петербурге необыкновенно странное происшествие’; нет у Маяковского: ‘необычайное приключение, бывшее с Энтони Бриггсом летом на даче’; нет у Блока: ‘мильоны – вас, нас – тьмы, и тьмы, и тьмы…’.

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).

A hallmark of Shtypel's poetry is its lyrical playfulness matching a complex structure - demanding from the reader an active, if constrained, co-operation. Vladimir Gubailovsky of ‘Русский журнал' (‘Russian Journal') has said of Stypel that ‘he is, above all else, clear. This does not mean,' Gubailovsky continues, ‘that his verse is in any way basic - in fact quite the contrary. What really stays with you after reading Shtypel is a sense of poetic clarity'.

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 Aleksandr Skidan
Genya Turovskaya with Eugene Ostashevsky, Evgeny Pavlov, Jacob Edmond & Natasha Randall
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008, pp.143
Aleksandr Skidan is one of Russia's most important contemporary poets. With language that is at once literary, cinematic, philosophical, journalistic, his innovative writing calls into question the distinction between poetry and philosophy.

by Sergei Lukyanenko
Translated by Andrew Bromfield
William Heinemann of The Random House Group, 2007, pp. 440
In Twilight Watch, the Others face their greatest threat yet. A renegade Other, his identity as yet unknown, has absconded with a fabled spell-book of untold power and appears bent on attacking the entire earth. Now forces of the Light and the Dark - the Night Watch and the Day Watch - must cooperate to stop him.

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 Andrey Platonov
Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler with Angela Livingstone, Olga Meerson and Eric Naiman
New York Review of Books; 2007; pp. 58
The Soviet writer Andrey Platonov saw much of his work suppressed or censored in his lifetime. In recent decades, however, these lost works have reemerged, and the eerie poetry and poignant humanity of Platonov's vision have become ever more clear. For Nadezhda Mandelstam and Joseph Brodsky, Platonov was the writer who most profoundly registered the spiritual shock of revolution.

by Viktor Shklovsky
Translated by Shushan Avagyan
Dalkey Archive Press; 2007; pp. 428
One of the greatest literary minds of the twentieth century, Viktor Shklovsky writes the critical equivalent of what Ross Chambers calls "loiterature"—writing that roams, playfully digresses, moving freely between the literary work and the world.

10 min; USSR, 1988
In a world of destruction where worlds no longer belong to one's voice, where letters express not what the lips have whispered and the lips read something different from what is written in the subtitles... In a world where a film only pretends to be a film, but, in fact, is a prayer for innocently killed Saint Boris and Saint Gleb.

Now - July 18 2008
RS&A Ltd. Gallery, London
Entry Free

Moscow art collecive of four, AES+F, presents video installation and porcelain work in their first solo exhibition in the UK. 'First Riot' brought new prominence to their already illustrious careers, when it met with sensational success at the Venice Biennale in 2007...

16 April
National Theatre
£3.50 (concs £2.50)
In Russia, Jonathan Dimbleby looks at how her past has shaped her current identity, and investigates what modern Russia means to her people now. The Platform is followed by a booksigning.

10 February
BFI, Southbank
Tarkovsky's genre-defying evocation of a decayed post-industrial society was filmed in a disused and rotting power station, the setting for a forbidden landscape known as "the zone" where the Stalker leads a Writer and a Scientist on a quest for a hidden truth. Thirty years on from the film's original release, Professor Ian Christie will introduce this seminal film. Following the screening there will be a discussion with special guests including Evgeny Tsymbal, the film's assistant director. For a chance to win tickets to this exclusive event, let us know what this film means to you at our forum.

Imperial Russian Ballet
Oranienbaum: Chinoiserie a la Russe
A la Russe: the Russian art of performance through the 18th and 19th centuries is celebrated in this issue, dedicated to Russia’s most famous ballets and to Catherine the Great’s personal Dacha – Oranienbaum.

Interpreting Russia
This issue is dedicated to the short-listed finalists and the Winner of the first Rossica Prize.

Imperial Russian Ballet
Oranienbaum: Chinoiserie a la Russe
A la Russe: the Russian art of performance through the 18th and 19th centuries is celebrated in this issue, dedicated to Russia’s most famous ballets and to Catherine the Great’s personal Dacha – Oranienbaum.

Interpreting Russia
This issue is dedicated to the short-listed finalists and the Winner of the first Rossica Prize.