The Russian Booker—Scandals

In 1992, the Booker corporation, a British wholesale food conglomerate that had been operating a prestigious literary prize out of London since the 1960s, decided to create an affiliate prize in Russia. According to Gerald Smith, a founder of the Russian Booker, “the future for young and unknown authors was hazy. Not to mention that official, Soviet-era benefits on which ‘hopeful’ authors once depended had come to an end. This is the exact situation of uncertainty that led us to found the Russian Booker.” The Russian version of the prize quickly became a resounding success. The first prize banquet generated significant press attention and earned the support of cultural heavyweights, including late-Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sinyavsky (1925-1997) and then-Minister of Culture Evgeny Sidorov, who thanked the Booker for demonstrating how literary prizes could be funded under capitalism.

The Booker’s success was due in no small part to its ability to generate press attention and spark scandal, which many post-Soviet periodicals were only too happy to court. In the Booker’s second year, the literary supplement to Nezavisimaya gazeta published a series of articles speculating on the prize, the candidates, and members of the jury in tones reminiscent of British tabloids. One critic, Efim Liamport, characterized jury member and philologist Vyacheslav Ivanov (1929-2017) as “wonderfully educated, but completely out of touch with living literature.” Fellow juror and famous dissident singer-songwriter Bulat Okudzhava (1924-1997), meanwhile, was said to be unlikely even to “do the reading (emu ne do chteniia).” “He’s an old, unwell man,” Liamport wrote. “Even in the best of times, he was neither a reader nor a writer—a bard, in a word.” Liamport’s series, one of many similar takedowns, showed that the imported literary prize had brought more than capital investment into post-Soviet Russia. It had also introduced modes of criticism and judgments of cultural value that would affect the development of literature for years to come.

The Booker and other prizes became much more influential than individual critics, in part because of the associated scandals. But even without controversy, the prizes were an attention machine. The Booker’s announced short list, the public jury, and the prize ceremony that invited all finalists but kept them in suspense until the end of the evening, were designed to direct the literary conversation. These features of the competition also meant that winners had to be acceptable (and defensible in public) to all members of the jury, of demonstrably high quality, and have some chance of being “competitive in store windows filled with glossy covers,” as the Booker publicity materials promised. For these reasons—and given the constant atmosphere of imminent scandal—juries were most likely to choose aesthetically conservative, plot- and character-based novels with clear social messages, easily “defensible” and with a chance of selling well.