Russian Booker Prize - Winners

Winners

The Russian Booker Prize was initially to be awarded for novels only, although books in other formats were still bestowed, such as the novella Baize-covered Table with Decanter by Vladimir Makanin, or the autobiographical essay The Show is Over by Bulat Okudzhava. The 1994 award winner was the autobiographical novel The General and His Army by Georgi Vladimov, which chronicles the writer's experience in the Soviet Army during Second World War. A year later, Andrey Sergeev's The Stamp Album, which is a collection of poetry, diaries, notes, essays and other non-fiction elements, won the prize. Similar themes as The General and His Army are found in Anatoly Azolsky's Cell, a book about life in Stalinist Russia. Although finished thirteen years ago but released around 2004 in Znamya, the novella Strange Letters by theologian Aleksandr Morozov received the award. Young writer Mikhail Butov was awarded the prize for his Freedom. Next, Mikhail Shishkin was awarded the prize for his novel The Capture Of Izmail and a year later Lyudmila Ulitskaya for her novel The Kukotsky Case, becoming the first female writer to do so. The latter was previously released in 2000 under Travel to the Seventh Side of the World. Oleg Pavlov received the award in 2002 for his Ninth Day Party in Karaganda: or the Story of the Recent Days.

Rubén Gallego won the 2002 Booker Prize with his White on Black, a 180-page book which he typed with two moveable index fingers. In this work, Gallego utilizes his own childhood experience in the Soviet Union, criticizing the disrespect towards disabled people and women, as he once told: "How did they hide disabled people in the Soviet Union? They just denied existence, the same way they denied the existence of all bad things – the same way that in the Soviet Union, old age was completely denied, femininity was denied... things that are also rejected in the army. Actually, I would compare the system with the army. In the army you don't have old women or children. The army simply fulfills its role. The Soviet state was like an enormous army..." In 2004, Vasily Aksyonov, who was called "a symbol of the last Soviet dissident writer with revoked Soviet citizenship", received the award for Voltairiens and Voltairiennes, despite being a commercial and critical failure. It depicts the life in France in the eighteenth century. Denis Gutsko's Russophone addresses the issue of Russophone people, who after the dissolution of the Soviet Union suddenly found themselves without a homeland, in new post-Soviet states, surrounded by ethnic hatred towards Russians.

Olga Slavnikova won the 2006 for the science fiction novel 2017, the title of which was inspired by the Russian Revolution in 1917. It has been compared with Tatyana Tolstaya's Slynx and Dmitry Glukhovsky's Metro 2033. Aleksandr Illichevsky's novel Matisse tells the stories of numerous people (prostitutes, tramps, students, people from Dagestan, etc) in different locations (pre- and postrevolutionary Russia, Kaukasus, etc) and times. A controversial winner was Mikhail Yelizarov's post-modernist "low-value fascist trash" Librarian, which depicted Communism positively. The 2009 winner, Yelena Chizhova's A Time of Women, is about three women who are raising a girl and who remember Russia's story, from the Soviet Regime till Vladimir Putin's succession. Critics found the book unsatisfied; Kirill Ankudinov from Literaturnaya Rossiya jeers the "literature sitting on grandmother's trunk and becoming drunk on memories of how well people behaved under Brezhnev", while Yevgeny Yermolin spoke of "cemetery erotica". In 2010, Elena Kolyadina won the award with her The Flower Cross, which is based on a real witch persecution in Totma, Russia. In the following year, the format was changed, so that now the novel of the decade was chosen due to lack of sponsors. Alexander Chudakov won the award posthumously for his A Gloom Descends Upon the Ancient Steps, which takes place in a fictional town in Kazakhstan and descibes life under Stalinist Russia. The current winner was Andrey Dmitriev's The Peasant and the Teenager, a novel about a boy who escaped the city for a village, meeting there an old man.