The 2017 Yasnaya Polyana Award Longlist

Two things stood out for me in jury members’ comments about this year’s Yasnaya Polyana Award longlist, which was announced a week or two ago. As someone who loves sorting through longlists, I particularly loved jury chair Vladimir Tolstoy’s remark that some readers look to shortlists for reading ideas but professional readers also pay attention to longlists. I wish more people did: I suspect there are lots of very good books that hit longlists for major prizes but never land on shortlists, let alone win prizes. (Hmm, that sounds like something interesting to look into...) I was also pleased that juror Pavel Basinsky noted how much he enjoys discovering new writers through literary juries. That’s half the fun of award lists—both long and short—for me, too.

There are 30 books on this year’s Yasnaya Polyana longlist so I won’t list them all, but here are a few:

One book I’ve already read and one that I’m reading:

• Sukhbat Aflatuni’s Муравьиный царь (The Ant King) (previous post) was my favorite weird book last year so I’m rooting for it to make the YP shortlist. I didn’t enjoy Aflatuni’s Adoration of the Magi enough to finish but am looking forward to his first novel, Ташкентский роман (Tashkent Novel), which is now on my shelf, too, thanks to the Russian Prize.
• Mikhail Gigolashvili’s Тайный год (The Secret/Mysterious Year), already a Big Book finalist and winner of the 2017 Russian Prize, is a colorful, funny, and peculiar novel about what happens when Ivan the Terrible runs away from his job. It’s so dense and demanding that I can only read a little at a time. I may be reading it all summer!

Several books already on the shelf that were longlisted for other prizes:

• Pavel Krusanov’s Железный пар (Iron Steam) is about twin brothers.
• Aleksandr Melikhov’s Свидание с Квазимодо (A Meeting [not sure what kind] with Quasimodo) is about a criminal psychologist.
• Dmitrii Novikov’s Голомяное пламя (hmm, the first word is an adjectival form of “голомя,” a Pomor word that means open sea or distant sea… so maybe something like Flame Out at Sea or Flame Over the Open Sea…) has interested me for a long time since Novikov is from Petrozavodsk and writes about the Russian north.
• Andrei Rubanov’s Патриот (The Patriot) isn’t on the shelf yet but will be soon since it’s a Big Book finalist; it was also a NatsBest finalist.
• Aleksei Slapovskii’s Неизвестность (Uncertainty is what I’m suspecting…) is also a Big Book finalist and will soon be on the shelf.

There are other authors on the list that I’ve already read and enjoyed, not to mention several books that interest me after reading reviews, but—keeping Basinsky’s comment in mind—I’ll finish off with two books that sound interesting in some way or other and were written by authors I’d never heard of until now:

• Olga Pokrovskaya’s Полцарства (Half the Kingdom, I guess?) sounds like it’s about regular people with regular problems and emotions… and it sounds positive since the word “светлая” is used to describe it so, who knows, I might even go out on a limb for “sunny”!
• Ganna Shevchenko’s Шахтерская глубокая (Miners’ Deep [Mine], I guess… the title words are the name of a mine) is told (at least at the beginning, which is all I looked at) by a female accountant at the mine. The voice seems engaging and I love a good first-person narrative, so this looks especially promising.

Disclaimers: The usual and having translated two Yasnaya Polyana Award jury members and was a co-participant with Basinsky at events during Russian Literature Week 2017 festivities in New York last month.

Up Next: Futurism. Gigolashvili’s The [Pick Your Adjective] Year, though that might take a very long time. And probably something else that takes a slight bit less focus than the Gigolashvili book. I haven’t decided what…