Russian Literature Does Not Belong to the Russian State

The designation of “foreign agent” is used by the Russian government to label individuals and organizations that receive foreign support or are (more nebulously) deemed to be under “foreign influence.” Those so designated are subject to extensive reporting and labeling requirements, restrictions on employment, education, political participation, and public activities, and face significant legal, financial, and social penalties that often make it difficult to continue living and working in the country. A sort of attempted social and political death sentence, the designation has become a powerful tool for suppressing independent journalism, civil society, and cultural figures, imposing onerous legal requirements and social stigma on those who receive it.

Such a designation constitutes one of our era’s most respectable distinctions. And it is an honor that belongs to the Dar Prize, a literary award which just last month celebrated its sophomore class and is currently accepting entries for its third outing. In practical terms, the Dar Prize seeks to award excellent writing in the Russian language, regardless of the writer’s citizenship or nationality. More importantly perhaps, the prize offers the winners translation into English, German, and French—the languages of the international book market—and hence access to a global audience.

The Prize’s website declares that it aims for a world “where literature in Russian takes its rightful place in the world, being responsible to humanity, and not to dictatorships.”

I am, by nature, usually distrustful of such ambition, particularly when it is applied to history, literature, art, and other such things in which people like me often naively believe one might be able to find aid or solace. And yet, over the past few weeks, as I have read my way through this year’s Dar Prize short list and winners, I find myself not only eagerly awaiting next year’s nominees, but also beginning to believe that the Prize’s goals may be—while still ambitious—not unrealistic.

Modern nationalism would have you believe that languages—and by extension literary traditions—are possessions that belong to one people or (more often) one state—theirs to control and define. But this is undoubtedly one of nationalism’s many lies.

Mikhail Shishkin, one of the co-founders of the Dar Prize and chairs its jury, is undoubtedly one of the Russian language’s greatest living literary titans. In addition to his own “foreign agent” badge of honor, Shishkin is the only person to have won all three of Russia’s top literary awards: Russian Booker Prize, the Russian National Bestseller (2005), and the Big Book Prize (2010). His assessment of literature inside of Russia today is stark. Writing in response to questions sent to him by me via email, he notes that “…living literature has been outlawed. Thousands of books are still published there, book fairs are still held, and literary prizes are still awarded, but for the past five years writers have largely pretended that everything is fine, that there is no war.” It is an immoral omission that the Dar Prize has sought to correct. All three of this year’s winners (the Jury awarded all three after they tied) wrestle with questions of war and its impact.

Alexandra Krashevskaya’s A Lullaby for Mariupol (Freedom Letters, 2024) perhaps takes on the issue most directly. Krashevskaya offers a first-hand, surreal view of the nearly three-month long 2022 siege of her native city that marked the beginning of the “full-scale” Russian invasion. Written in the form of a non-chronological diary, A Lullaby for Mariupol is a book that defies genre, neither a fictional account of real events nor an example of artistic journalism. The prose throughout is raw, visceral, and shocked. Dreams are one of the central organizing principles in a book that takes much of its power from how disturbingly unmoored the narrative is. This is because dreams, Krashevskaya wrote to me, “most accurately convey what it feels like to exist within a war.” Which is to say, A Lullaby for Mariupol seeks to do that most important thing: to witness.

To bear witness to horrors visited on us by those forces at work in the world that would strip us of our humanity is perhaps the best act of human-ness open to us. It is, often, the last way in which we might do our duty to one another. But it is also a way of exculpating ourselves of the moral crimes even when we do not deserve such clemency. How guilty are we as individuals of the collective crimes of not just our species but of our nations and families? This is a question with which every thinking, feeling Russian I know is wrestling these days. It is a question with which a good deal many more Americans ought to be struggling.

And it is the question at the heart of the second Dar Prize winning novel, Oleg Radzinsky’s Days of Repentance (BABooks 2024). At the center of the novel is the Naidenov family of Moscow. The family seeks to live in parallel to their country and society, a plan that might have worked if not for two dual intrusions. In the year the war in Ukraine begins, a new member of the family arrives. Daletskaya is the family patriarch’s illegitimate daughter. A woman with dwarfism, her gradual intrusion into the family’s home mirrors the way in which state power—and then dependency upon it, followed by loyalty to it—crept into homes and lives of ordinary Russians.

While it seems unthinkable now, in the midst not only of the war in Ukraine, but what seem like very dark days for humanity everywhere, there will one day be an after.

“Not every person can right the historical wrongs, but every person can choose how to behave when met by the individual choice,” Radzinsky wrote to me in an email. Our collective abandonment of this moral fact could go a long way to explain the current state of things in much of the world. But the level of personal culpability we are each willing to accept is even critical to what comes after conflict. While it seems unthinkable now, in the midst not only of the war in Ukraine, but what seem like very dark days for humanity everywhere, there will one day be an after.

The third 2026 Dar Prize winner, Ksenia Buksha’s Little Paradise (Freedom Letters, 2024), is set in the fictional town of Rayok, fifteen years after the end of a fictional war—in the still yet to come “after.” At its center is the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old boy, a child born after the fighting had already ended. The novel is suffused with a quiet mystical atmosphere—the missing boy turns out to be a kind of prophetic figure, missing as he has gone to seek understanding in the mountains among the old terrorist hideouts. Ultimately, I would argue, it is less a political novel than a spiritual one.

Buksha’s response to my very first interview question sent me back to the novel. “As a Christian, I would put it this way: the very nature of love is divine,” she wrote to the second round of questions. Reading that answer, I realized I had missed something essential on my first pass, and I reread the book with entirely different eyes. I had somehow forgotten that one often encounters a deeply spiritual imagination in Russian literature, and that this is possible in the new Russian literary tradition being created outside the borders of the state today.

The three winners of this year’s Dar Prize—and the shortlisted books as well—reveal the complexity of the canon taking shape. Ilya Danishevsky’s Damocles Techno (Freedom Press 2024) is one of the most linguistically and culturally complex and demanding books I have ever read. Meaning that I hope desperately that it too will be translated into English (and other commercially viable languages), but I also worry that it will find the right translator. Similarly, Igor Beloded’s short-story collection The Morning Was The Eye (Alpine Nonfiction 2024) proves gloriously strange, making it both a joy to read and a challenge for any translator who is brave enough to take it on. And those are just my favorites of the “runners up.”

The Russian state has systematically set out to silence its boldest and most innovative writers. Indeed many—if not most—have left the country in order to continue working. At the same time, the state has, through the insidious “Russky mir” doctrine attempted to claim for itself ownership over the Russian language, a campaign that has been so successful that former Soviet states have increasingly targeted the Russian language in their quests for national sovereignty. This includes Ukraine, where the Russian language recently lost protected status.

Modern nationalism would have you believe that languages—and by extension literary traditions—are possessions that belong to one people or (more often) one state—theirs to control and define. But this is undoubtedly one of nationalism’s many lies. French belongs as much to a Frenchman in Paris as it does to a Nilotic woman in Kinshasa, after all. And no one would demand that Ayi Kwei Armah cease to write in English or Ivonne Coñuecar never publish again in Spanish. And the same is true for Russian.

The Russian language and Russian literature do not belong to the Russian state, and they certainly are not the possessions of the Putin regime. The Dar Prize not only proclaims this truth, but works to make it a viable and visible reality. This is because the Prize does not simply celebrate writers, who defy the state’s directive to write certain things in a certain way, but by ensuring that the work of the defiant crosses borders and enters new literary traditions through translation, without the support of the Russian state.

The writers honored by the Dar Prize are all, in different ways, recording a catastrophe. But in that recording of destruction they are building something alive. If Shishkin is right that living literature has been outlawed inside Russia, then the future of Russian literature is already being written elsewhere. The Dar Prize simply recognizes that fact.