Booker Winners and Others-II (Vol.10 of the GLAS Series)

True to our commitment to acquaint publishers and readers with the winners of the Booker Russian Novel Prize, we offer excerpts from the short-listed novels of 1994 with comments by the chairman of that year's jury, Lev Anninsky. All the excerpts selected read like complete stories and so can be enjoyed by the specialist and the general reader alike. As in previous years the Booker Prize spotlighted nearly all the outstanding novels published in the preceding year, and simply by showing a sustained interest in the Russian novel it encouraged authors to turn back to this genre from the short story and non-fiction which had been dominating Russian writing in the past few turbulent years. The third year of the Booker Games produced another rich display of varied and well-written works. There is no doubt that in the country of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky the standard of creative writing has never fallen. Now that most of the previously banned works have been published we can see that in each decade of this century at least a dozen excellent authors were actively writing, even though they could not always publish their works officially. The 1994 short list (as well as the long list) has shown up several definite trends in themes and styles. Writers are trying to take a fresh look at Russia's past from the vantage point of the present day and with the new knowledge that has come to light in recent years (Okudzhava, Dolinyak, Levitin, Buida). They enjoy delving into formerly forbidden subjects such as religion, sex, the subconscious, crime (Slapovsky, Aleshkovsky, Eppel, Klimontovich, Galperin). Biographies and autobiographies, mainly re-appraisals of the past, are very popular. There is much experimentation in style and form. Each year new literary discoveries from previous decades are still being made, works that for various reasons, but mainly because of their unorthodox nature, have remained unpublished to this day. Suffice it to recall that the present collection opens with a story by the first Russian Booker Prize winner, Mark Kharitonov, which was written in 1975 but published only in 1994; or take Asar Eppel who has been writing fiction all his life but only recently been able to publish some of it, instantly gaining a national reputation; or two outstanding poets, Georgy Mark and Genrikh Sapgir, whose long overdue fame came to them only in their later years. There is every reason to suppose that the full history of Russian literature had not yet been written, not all its treasures have been retrieved from the obscurity of the archives, and we can still look forward to exciting new surprises.

"Thanks to Glas many of the new Russian writers are now available to the Western reader." --The New Yorker

"The Booker has helped fill the vacuum of official recognition for writers ... and Glas publishes translated excerpts from the short-listed novels, offering the Anglophone audience a glimpse of what all the fuss is about..." --Moscow Times