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Russia holds first erotic writing
award ceremony
AFP MOSCOW, Oct 4: Italy has Boccaccio’s Decameron. Britain has Fanny Hill. France has ... well, just about everything. But Russia is just taking its first timid steps into the world of erotic literature, as demonstrated at an award ceremony in Moscow this week. |
More than 350 authors aged from 18 to 91 took part in the "Russian Decameron"
competition for erotic writing, the first such event since Soviet-imposed
corsets began to loosen in the late 1980s, and by all accounts they were not
taking too many risks.
Crowned the best erotic writer and winner of a
US$15,000 (RM57,000) prize, Igor Sakhnovsky from the Urals city of Yekaterinburg
swore that his work was perfectly suitable for 13-year-old
schoolchildren.
Jury member Vladimir Mirzoyev agreed, describing
Sakhnovsky's collection of stories as "written in the best traditions of Russian
literature, very delicate, not at all violent or vulgar".
Another jury
member, the worldfamous author of Pushkin House Andrei Bitov, observed bluntly
that there was "no eroticism" in the works of the finalists.
"This is an
insurmountable barrier for the Russian language which is very shy," he said. "We
should leave sex to ordinary people and not try to sell it in written text."
Sakhnovsky said he had not censored himself and had simply followed the example
of such writers as Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita) or the Nobel prize-winning Ivan
Bunin who, he said, had been "quite uninhibited" in their handling of intimate
scenes.
Some of the judges believed that in the winner's work the
delicacy of the writing had in effect removed all sensuality.
"The
winners were writers who had put the emphasis on other things," said jury member
Sergei Gandlevsky.
The awards presenter Alexander Mikhailov declared that
"in Russia, as in the Soviet Union, there is no sex", an echo, 15 years on, of a
phrase that resounded throughout the country when spoken by a participant in a
televised debate during the period of perestroika.
The second prize was
awarded jointly to three Moscow writers, Farid Nagim, Maria Loseva and Ilya
Vetkin. — AFP