It is rare that the poetry of musicians is evaluated with official literary awards. But Boris Grebenshchikov is the only one, and you immediately recognize his poetry in songs: by metaphor, unconventional rhymes, wisdom, self-irony and sometimes very unexpected images and characters. Among them there are “Guard Sergeev” and “Ivan Bodhidharma”, then “Queen Anna”, “Nikita Ryazansky” and “Afanasy Nikitin”. The leader of “Aquarium” for the first time became a laureate of the oldest literary award – the Andrey Bely Prize.
BG was honored in the nomination “For Services to Russian Literature” with a florid but grateful wording “For an impressive life and encouraging labors.”
– This year the award turned out to be a bit unusual, – explained the organizers. – In recent years, short lists usually included five finalists … Now the competition has increased a lot.
The award itself is amazing. The Andrei Bely Prize was initially awarded in three nominations: Russian Poetry, Prose, and Humanitarian Research. Now two more have been added to them: “Translation”, “For services to Russian literature” and “Literary projects and criticism”.
But the prize fund, obviously, will not change again: since the establishment in 1978, the winners are quite symbolically awarded here one ruble, a bottle of vodka (in common parlance it is called “white”) and an apple. There is an element of play and happening in this. But this award is absolutely serious: in past years it was accepted with gratitude by really excellent writers: Andrey Bitov, Sasha Sokolov, Gennady Aigi and others. As well as non-reference literary researchers Boris Groys, Mikhail Epshtein and Vladimir Malyavin.
by the way
In November BG released another amazing book – “The Sacred Places of India”. He traveled in this country for over 25 years: he looked, thought, dreamed, meditated, found new sounds and musical ideas. And, for example, I celebrated my 40th birthday in India. I visited, of course, where The Beatles ended up in the late 60s.
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