ELKOST International literary agency - National Prize in China 2006

Featured titles

THE DIARY OF A GULAG PRISON GUARD by Ivan Chistyakov (1934-1936, NF)

Rights sold: Czech Republic – EUROMEDIA, Estonia - ARGO, France – DeNoël, Germany - MSB Matthes & Seitz, Italy - Pearson Paravia (Bruno Mondadori), Netherlands - Ambo | Anthos Uitgevers, Poland - BELLONA, Russia - CORPUS, World English - GRANTA, US - PEGASUS

Ivan Chistyakov’s diary is unique historical testimony. He commanded an armed guard unit on a section of BAM, the Baikal-Amur Railway which was built by forced labour.

We have few memoirs written even by people on the outside of the barbed wire. This diary, written inside the Gulag, gives a day by day account of life there over several months in 1935-36 and is probably unique.

The original diary is in the safekeeping of the Memorial human rights centre in Moscow which, since the late 1980s, has been collecting documents, testimony, memoirs, and letters relevant to the history of political repression in the USSR. It was passed to them by people who had come upon it among the papers left by a distant female relative.

The diary consists of two medium-sized exercise books. One describes three days in August 1934 which Chistyakov spent hunting, before being conscripted into the interior troops and sent to BAM. His notes are reminiscent of Ivan Turgenev’s classic A Hunter’s Sketches, illustrated by the author. They suggest nostalgia for the old, pre-revolutionary Russia and are in total contrast to the other notebook, which was written in 1935-36 when Chistyakov was working in the Gulag.

We do not know where Ivan Chistyakov was in 1939 when, along the railway built by the labour of prisoners he had guarded in 1935-36, long echelons of wagons passed bearing new prisoners to BAM. Among them was one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets, Nikolai Zabolotsky.

It is a miracle that Chistyakov’s diary, whose entries break off, probably, with his arrest, somehow survived, that it did not fall into the hands of NKVD officials, that it was not discarded and destroyed, and that somebody managed to send it to Moscow.

Thanks to this miracle, one more voice of a lonely man who lived in a fearful era has come down to us.

A CONQUISTADOR PORTRAIT GALLERY, history of the Spanish Conquest of America by Andrei Kofman

Rights sold: Russia - KRIGA

It’s doubtful there’s ever been an epoch in human history that can match the significance of the extraordinary age of great geographical discoveries: it was an event with a truly global scale that, in essence, began the process that is now called globalization. The epoch opened with the discovery of the New World in 1492 and its most important event was certainly the Spanish conquest of the Americas, which was given the name Conquista.

It’s no exaggeration to characterize the conquest, over all, as the most venturesome undertaking in human history. The defining characteristic of the conquest is the unique experience of entering an untouched expanse—this was unique because the expanse under discussion was two huge unexplored continents. The conquest blended with pioneering exploration and became intertwined with geographical discovery. Along with new knowledge of Earth came encounters with the unknown, miracles at every turn, mortal dangers, the harshest of ordeals, constant stepping over the boundaries of common sense and the limits of human possibility, unusual adventures, and plots that would be the envy of any chivalric tale.

Kofman reconstructs the history of the conquest through biographies of well-known conquistadors. Masterminds of the Conquest present a fascinating subject for analysis and reflection. There’s no denying that the conquistadors were not particularly appealing people and many of their deeds inspire revulsion. But they were undisputedly out-of-the-ordinary individuals who came into the world when the Middle Ages were ending and the Early Modern Period was beginning. A complex, multidimensional figure is created by combining various points of view of a person and his actions, including how he sees himself. The book is both based in scholarship and intended for the broadest readership, including high school students.

The process of choosing figures for the book was fairly obvious: conquistadors who made the most significant discoveries and conquests stand out in the history of the conquest. Four individual chapters are dedicated to four people who did not make any particular discoveries or conquests but were notable for other things: one for miserliness and brutality, another for betrayal, a third for carelessness, and a fourth for revolt and atrocities. It goes without saying that the book’s chapters turned out to be very uneven: some are voluminous and others are short but their lengths depend on factual material as well as significance, interest, and the abundance of events and peripeteias. The names and deeds of conquistadors of the so-called “second tier” have not been forgotten, either: they have found their places in the book and are included in thematically appropriate chapters. Certain key concepts of the ideologies and practices of the conquest that are linked to various historical moments have found places and explanations in the book, too.