.MarkGaleotti, BenMacintyre1, Serhii Plokhy and Taylor Downing recently discussed their nonfiction books about Russia
BOOK-PRIZE ceremonies are often a bit of a let-down. Until the outcome is revealed, much of the focus is on what the seating plan and choreography suggest about the identity of the winner. After the announcement, everybody goes home. And they can be oddly unintellectual. The avowed purpose is to promote literature, but they generally feel more like horse-races than symposiums, the chatter dwelling on sales boosts rather than ideas.
Pushkin House is a venerable London-based charity that promotes Russian culture and Anglo-Russian dialogue. In 2013 it introduced a prize for nonfiction books about Russia, written or translated into English . Beginning as a modest event, these days the ceremony is conducted over a glitzy candlelit dinner at the Charterhouse, a medieval former monastery in central London.
, referred to the Soviet mole in NATO who helped to avert nuclear Armageddon during a little-known cold-war near-miss. Western policymakers “knew nothing about what the [Soviet] leadership was thinking”, he reflected, just as, for all their sophisticated intelligence, they know little of the mind-sets of Iranian and North Korean leaders now.
A running theme was Russia’s relationship with Ukraine—a fraternity that shaped Russian literature but has now been tragically shattered. “You cannot imagine Russian cultural history without Ukraine—and the other way around,” remarked Andrei Zorin, a professor at Oxford and one of this year’s judges.
Humour—especially the bleak, existential kind that has been a vital survival technique in Russia for centuries—was another of the evening’s motifs, from Mr Galeotti’s deadpan accounts of his meetings with Russian gangsters, to Mr Plokhy’s view of “Chernobyl”, the hit HBO drama broadcast after his book was published. “They cut a couple of corners—like the people who constructed the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant,” Mr Plokhy said.
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