Fedya Otroshchenko, editor of Demagog, talked to poet, critic and sociologist of literature Eugenia Vezhlyan, who is on the expert council of the independent Dar Prize.

I should make a little preface: this interview was recorded in mid-February, when the Berlin Book Fair hadn't even been officially announced yet, when not much time had passed since the scandal surrounding Ilichevsky's novel October 7 that it was still in the air. But it seems that Zhenya was talking about some important processes that have only intensified since then; it's just that the examples may change from month to month, but the core remains. 

- I have the feeling that in the last year or so emigrant literature has begun to look for occasions to institutionalize itself: in the summer there was the Words Beyond Self media about the emigrant literary process, in early fall there was a book fair in Prague...

- ...we need some kind of hub for information about what is happening in literature and for its representation. There's a fair in Berlin, too.

- ...yes, but the Dar Prize is not only about collecting and describing, but also about building a certain hierarchy, like any prize: there are first-row writers, second-row writers, third-row writers, and so on. Do you have a feeling of such institutionalization?

- I think that at the stage at which the Dar Prize is at, it is too early to say to what extent these efforts will really contribute to the institutionalization of emigrant literature as some kind of social phenomenon, a social whole.

It seems to me that this will be clear when we go through the prize cycle and see how the results of this prize work for the visibility of the prize itself, for its recognizability, for focusing, drawing attention to the efforts of authors who write in Russian outside Russia, and to the efforts of publishers who work in this field. Publishers and bookstores are a very important part of literature as a social institution, and if they are not there, we will have nothing to talk about. And I want to emphasize that we are talking about literature as a social institution, because in any historical situation there are always people who write their texts. The texts may even be brilliant, or they may be nothing - it doesn't matter. What is important is that these texts either have somewhere to be included, or they have nowhere to be included, there is simply no process in which they get their reputation and become an event. What is needed is institutionalization. Accordingly, where there is institutionalization, there is economy: the efforts of publishers, the efforts of those who somehow promote oppositional Russian-language books. These independent bookstores in Europe, in Israel, for example, Babel (in fact, Babel is the flagship of this movement), are very important in this process.

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