Squaring the Circle

Celebrating the 10th year of Russia's Debut Prize for young writers. In the early 1990s the Booker Prize, brought to Russia from Britain, gave new impetus to the Russian novel. A decade later came the Debut Prize for young authors, now celebrating its tenth year. The authors in this prose anthology come from various parts of Russia - none of them ever lived in the Soviet Union. Unlike many older writers, they are not fighting the Soviet past. Why the title Squaring the Circle? The authors live in a system of multiple uncertainties. To solve what is insoluble, to do what is undoable: that is the demand made of a young person today by unpredictable Russian reality. There are no guarantees, but anything is possible. Theirs is a fundamentally new way of thinking, a new way of seeing the world. Today an unusually gifted generation is entering Russian literature. Literature has not seen such an influx of energy in a long time. This new generation writing in Russian - both the individual writers and the phenomenon as a whole - deserves great attention.