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Squaring the Circle: Winners of the Debut Prize for Fiction
Author(s): Olga Slavnikova (Author, Editor), Natasha Perova
- Publisher: Glas
- Publication Date: 1 May 2010
- Language: English
- Print length: 300 pages
- ISBN-10: 5717200862
- ISBN-13: 9785717200868
Book Description
Short stories by winners of the Debut Prize
This anthology presents Russian prose by a new generation. The authors, who come from various parts of Russia, never lived in the Soviet Union. They are free of the Soviet legacy. They have no nostalgia and do not resonate to the sort of art that attempts to turn everything Soviet into vintage chic. And unlike many older writers, they are not fighting the Soviet past. Why the title
Squaring the Circle? The authors live in a system of multiple uncertainties. The problems that life poses them often have no solution. To solve what is insoluble, to do what is undoable: that is the demand made of a young person today by unpredictable Russian reality. Young people have no algorithms for building their lives and careers. There are no guarantees, but anything is possible. Theirs is a fundamentally new way of thinking, a new way of seeing the world.Every year, the
Debut receives up to 50,000 entries from every region of Russia, and around the world. It has shown that a person s life experience at any age is complete in and of itself. What a person knows about the world in his early 20s has been forgotten by the time he is 30. The Debut prompts them to commit to literature their unique experiences, what might be described as the shock of their first encounter with grown-up life. Today an unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature. Literature has not seen such an influx of energy in a long time. Perhaps this change is an anthropological response to the difficult position of culture and literature. This new generation writing in Russian both the individual writers and the phenomenon as a whole deserves great attention.Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Aleksei Lukyanov was born in 1976 near the town of Solikamsk in the Urals. He studied at the Solikamsk Teacher-training College, his studies interrupted by army service. Subsequently he changed many occupations and finally chose the profession of a smith. He is a prolific author with several short novels and a great number of short stories to his name published in the leading literary journals and hailed by critics for their ingenious use of the language and intricately woven allusions. (Book Review) Lukyanov is twice finalist of the Debut Prize and winner of the New Pushkin Prize for innovative treatment of Russian literary traditions.
Igor Savelyev was born in 1983 in Ufa (Bashkiria). He has a degree in Philology from Ufa University and is now writing his PhD dissertation on contemporary Russian criticism. He has been publishing his work since 1999 in the leading literary magazines. His short novel Pale City, based on personal hitchhiking experiences, was shortlisted for the Debut and the Belkin prizes in 2004. As a critic Savelyev was awarded the Ural magazines prize for 2008. Critics unanimously praised his prose for its masterful, finely chiseled style based on brilliant counterpoints like a virtuoso music piece. Here realism is bordering on phantasmagoria a striking sample of new-generation psychological prose.
Polina Klyukina was born in 1986 in the city of Perm in the Urals. She is currently a student at the Moscow Literary Institute and the Publishing Universitys Department of Journalism as well as writing for the leading periodicals. She published her stories in Novy Mir for 2009. Klyukina was a Debut finalist in 2008.
Denis Osokin was born in 1977 in Kazan (Tatarstan). He studied psychology at Warsaw University before enrolling in Kazan Universitys Department of Philology which he finished in 2002. Apart from the Debut Prize in 2001 he was also a finalist of the Andrei Bely Prize (2004) and Yuri Kazakov Prize (2005), winner of the Star Pass Prize (2008). His short stories are regularly appearing in leading literary journals and his book Ladies of the Maple came out in 2003 from NLO. As a screenplay writer he works for the cinema and TV.
