Шорт-лист премии «Дар» второго сезона

A novel in which the carefree macabre of the characters is paradoxically homologous to the complex reality, highlighting its most monstrous twists and turns, offers the reader a journey into the world under the stairs, a trip in your pocket: be brave, my friend, scratch the cat behind the ear, — there will be fairy tales capable of prolonging life (just don't stop telling them), tin girls torn apart by patrons, people with sharp edges, empty hopes, and something that, alas, even love cannot defeat this season.

"...The first rupture of war. You still don't understand, don't realize what war is. You still think it's a local event that will freeze in history, in your own memory, as a vivid episode that you can later recall as a tragicomic curiosity. You don't yet know that at this very moment your world has shattered into thousands of shapeless, ugly fragments. A person's world ceases to be a coherent story and falls apart into episodes — sometimes disjointed, random — in which old friends and acquaintances are often lost, but new shadows of a new reality appear.

You have seen Yevgeny Feldman's photographs, even if you don't know who took them. The panorama of the rally on Bolotnaya Square, Alexei Navalny with his “dosirak” and on his way to the Central Election Commission, clashes with Berkut on Maidan, the “parade of prisoners” in Donetsk, the human chain in Minsk — Feldman's photographs capture an entire era, and no one else has seen so many of its key events from such close quarters. In just a few years, the teenager who used to go to punk concerts with his camera became Russia's most famous documentary filmmaker — and the country descended into brutal repression and full-scale war. To honestly show the main stages of this journey, Feldman risked his life many times and broke the rules. Therefore, the book in which he talks about his work reads both as a tragedy and an adventure novel.

Spring 2022 in Mariupol. This book immerses the reader in the events of that time. Amidst rocket fire, the voice of a young woman can be heard, sometimes calm and hopeful, sometimes breaking into a desperate cry. We are presented with a kaleidoscope of images of unbearable reality. After what she has been through, the author manages to do the almost impossible — to keep hope alive.

The protagonist of Yuri Troitsky's debut novel is a modern trickster. We don't know his first or last name, only the cute German word “Schatz” — “treasure” — which he and his wife use to refer to each other. Schatz is an entrepreneur who made his career in the 1990s and 2000s and regularly finds himself in various predicaments, some absurd, some dramatic, and some hopeless. Nevertheless, he manages to get out alive every time. We watch the hero grow up and come of age in the Moscow suburbs and Moscow, then we see him in Riga, London, and seaside resorts. Despite the circumstances, Schatz remains a human being everywhere, even if, like his famous predecessor, he tries to practice relatively honest ways of taking money from the population. We will see the hero for the last time on February 24, 2022, in Odessa — but, of course, this is not the end of his life...

In the collection of short stories “The Morning Was an Eye” by Igor Beloded, a semi-finalist for the Big Book Award, there are, on the contrary, plenty of oddities. Igor Beloded, as can be seen from his novel The Great Mother, published by RIPOL Classic, and the collection of short stories Don't Talk About Him (Alpina.Proza, 2023), is more of a “writer for writers” than a writer for readers. However, in the short story format, the complexity beloved by the author takes on a concentrated form. Beloded's stories are like a mixture that can and should be taken in one gulp. Two stories a day, seven days a week, for a successful course of treatment for a lack of beautiful literary language and (straight) linearity of time.

On February 24, 2022, Ukrainian Zhenya Berezhnaya woke up to a call from her relatives in Kharkiv: war had begun. Her familiar life in beloved Kyiv, where Zhenya wrote fairy tales for adults, taught, and hosted a podcast about literature, was over. Sirens and nights spent in basements, evacuation, fleeing, the loss of a loved one, attempts to rebuild her life in a new country — all this is described in Berezhnaya's autobiographical novel (Not) About War. This book is not really about war — it is about the experience of overcoming trauma, about how, thanks to creativity and the support of caring people, there is a place for freedom, love, and hope in a terrible reality.

Tatyana Zamirovskaya's first non-fiction book is a collection of essays, memories, and reflections on memory and forgetting, music and love, emigration and ties to Belarus through the ghostly identity of a person who once believed that music is stronger than death and text is more important than life. The book originated from a long essay about experiencing the war in Ukraine, “Spending The War Without You.” , in which I describe the year 2022, when I was working in news (Voice of America), experiencing intense emotional detachment, and going to all the concerts of my favorite musicians from my youth in order to feel alive again and relearn how to cry.

The war began on television. But it didn't stay there. A Moscow saga during Putin's war in Ukraine. The Naydenov family lived their lives, while outside their apartment windows, a different life was being lived, controlled by different people. The Naydenovs thought that's how it would always be—two parallel, unintersecting lives in one country. Or two countries—their own private one and the rest of Russia. Then the war started, and everything changed. Now they had to decide whether to run or fight. Or try to put back together what the war had broken. The war started on TV. Then the tanks rolled off the blue screen and into our apartments. Along with the war.

The story “Parents' Day” is a vivid, poignant portrait of life during wartime, where events are intertwined with memories and reflections. Against the backdrop of a war-torn but vibrant city, the main character tries to understand and maintain a connection with his son in the midst of tragic events. Through their dialogues, internal monologues, and encounters with people, he reveals the generational conflict of worldviews, the theme of duty, personal responsibility, and love. Death for one's beliefs is a reality of our time. This book is not only a family story, but also a direct look at war, its everyday nature and cruelty. The synthesis of documentary accuracy, lyricism, and philosophical reflection transforms Parent's Day into a text that touches the deepest strings of the soul and encourages us to live when it seems that we no longer have the strength to do so.

A debut autofiction novel about asexuality, aromanticism, Christianity, and one summer in Tbilisi. The narrator moves from Russia to Georgia and falls in love through correspondence with someone living in Moscow, but soon begins to ask himself questions: What is love? What does it mean to fall in love? What does he really want from people? Documenting his first summer in exile: walks around the city, hanging out in bars with friends, trips to the mountains — Grisha Prorokov explores his own experience of asexuality and aromanticism, drawing on the history and culture of Christianity: the letters of the Apostle Paul, the tapestries “Lady with a Unicorn” and the image of Mary Magdalene.

“Little Paradise” is the first attempt in the history of the ongoing war to reflectively look into the future: what will happen 15 years after it ends?