The other day, a message came to the mail of the MK correspondent: “The National Book Prize Glavkniga is being established in Russia. It will be awarded for a work of art written in Russian and signed for publication in the year preceding the award. At first I thought – this is a joke, who will give a modern award (even a patriotic one) such a deliberately Soviet name, this is not a nostalgic brand of sausage or dairy products. But the information was confirmed, moreover, Glavkniga is predicted to be a key premium institution as opposed to liberal projects. The correspondent of “MK” understood the situation.
According to media publications, Glavkniga has continuity with the National Bestseller, which has died in Bose. This is indicated by the presence of businessman Anton Treushnikov among the initiators, largely thanks to whom the National Best existed. Now, Treushnikov, together with Vyacheslav Konovalov (a well-known expert and figure in the literary process), decided to reboot the last project, although this is not directly mentioned anywhere.
Why did I cling to the word “Glavkniga” so much, what is wrong with it? It’s a matter of context. Many people remember the scandal with the concert “Come and See” by a well-known artist, whose name coincided with the name of the 1985 military drama about the atrocities of the Nazis in Belarus. So the “Glavkniga” painfully resembles the name of the censorship punitive body of the USSR – Glavlit.
We learned to laugh at communist naming long before the release of Vladimir Bortko’s film “The Heart of a Dog” on the wide perestroika screen. But it was the scene from the film, where the dog who became a comrade pronounces “abyr-valg” (Glavryba), sowed disbelief in the prospects of such word formation in millions of hearts. (One of the first, by the way, was the satirist Arkady Averchenko who drew attention to the deadly way for Russian speech to come up with “barking” words and hard-to-hear abbreviations.) For decades, negative connotations have been entrenched in Glavryb, Glavpromstroy and Glavlit.
How else, if the main department for literature and publishing in a totalitarian state was entrusted with “control over all types of printing”, “publication of lists of harmful literature” and the removal of “wrong” books from bookstores, including second-hand bookshops, and libraries. It was impossible to appoint an editor or a member of the editorial board to a “thick” literary journal, to publish one line without the permission of the administration – and a huge number of exemplary works remained unknown to readers until the collapse of the unified and indestructible. If there were no Glavlit, there would be no persecution of the writers who left and remained, truncated versions of novels and short stories, there would not be the very phenomenon of “Returned Literature”. Why was the aforementioned “Heart of a Dog” published in the Union for the first time only in 1987? There is only one answer: Glavlit.
It was. This is part of the story. But lived through – and forgotten. And it seems that in the 21st century no one wants to return to the past.
But Mr. Konovalov is quite satisfied with the word “Glavkniga”, where everyone “sees something of his own”.
“We were inspired by the cultural code of the avant-garde with its poster style, and laconic wording. And I wanted the name not to be pretentious and heavy. This is how the name turned out, which, on the one hand, is devoid of pathos, on the other hand, attracts attention and becomes an occasion for discussion, ”he told our publication.
The appearance of the Glavknigi was welcomed by the writer, an active and somewhat infamous supporter of the SVO Alexander Pelevin, in his Telegram channel he wrote the following:
“After the death of the National Best, the institute of literary awards practically disappeared. National Best was cool precisely because of its transparency and impartiality, and the time for impartiality has passed. What else is there? The Big Book, a little more than completely liberal, The Nose, God forgive me?.. Well, Yasnaya Polyana, okay, okay. I would like to establish some kind of award. A special one, severely “cottoned”, so as not to let the liberals in. “Russian Slep” some …
It turns out that we now have a “cotton” award.
And in this regard, I recalled the controversy in the pages of Moskovsky Komsomolets about the law on combating excessive foreign borrowing. Then the classic writer Yuri Polyakov gave an example of a variant of “cleansing” the Russian language from lexical imports: here we have Food City, but we need to advise this company to be called “Pishchegrad”.
Vyacheslav Konovalov denies that Glavkniga is a rebranding of National Best in the light of new legislative initiatives. Here is his verbatim comment: “The version with the law is beautiful, but in fact, the exceptionally rich tonality of the Russian language and the potential of meanings that are inherent in it were taken into account.” OK. Let it be.
But to me alone, but also to the linguist and author of “philological detective stories” Tatyana Shakhmatova, this whole idea seemed like a cruel joke.
“Sometimes you read this kind of news from the world of literature and you think, ‘it can’t be, they are trolling,’” she said. And I noticed that from the “Glavknigi” it pulls a clerk a mile away, but not from the “National Best”. Why?
– Yes, because behind the “National Best” there is a completely understandable measure of literary success. Bestseller, this is the best in sales, the most popular, the most famous. And no matter how anyone treats foreign borrowings, the concept of “bestseller” has taken root and it is not a synonym for the word “main”. The Glavkniga contains completely different ideas. If there is a main ledger, then there are others – non-main ones. In the religious paradigm, the concept of the main ledger already exists. And in the case of a literary award, in my opinion, the idea of a vertical artistic hierarchy and the idea of appointing an unconditional leader from above arise quite clearly.
“The vacancy of the poet has been left, it is dangerous, if not empty,” Boris Pasternak wrote when they wanted to appoint him poet number 1 in Soviet Russia. But nowadays, it seems, no one leaves the “vacancy” – on the contrary, for the right to be There are serious fights in social networks. And we continue with leaps and bounds, without hiding our enthusiasm, to go not into the future, but in the opposite direction. Back in the USSR.
Newspaper headline:
“It can’t be, they’re trolling!”