ELKOST International literary agency - Lyudmila Ulitskaya receives the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize 2023

"We would like this year's Remarque Peace Prize to be understood as a sign of hope: the logic of war should not have the last word. The last word must be the language of humanity, which also unites people of hostile states. The violence of war must not silence the language of literature and art," says the chair of the Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize jury, Prof. Dr. Susanne Menzel-Riedl, President of the University of Osnabrück.

"That is why we hoped to invite a writer from Russia and an artist from Ukraine to Osnabrück to honor them with the Remarque Peace Prize and the special prize," adds the jury's vice chair, Osnabrück Mayor Katharina Pötter.

"We are pleased that the Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya will accept the Peace Prize and the Ukrainian draftsman Sergiy Maidukov the Special Prize, but at the same time we have to accept that as long as Russia's war of aggression on Ukraine has not ended, neither of them will be able to take a podium," Menzel-Riedl and Pötter explain. "Therefore, we will present the award to Lyudmila Yevgenyevna Ulitskaya and Sergiy Maidukov on different dates."

Every two years since 1991, the city of Osnabrück has awarded the Peace Prize named after Osnabrück-born writer Erich Maria Remarque. This year, the award will be presented for the 16th time.

For additional info, see https://friedensstadt.osnabrueck.de/en/what-we-do/erich-maria-remarque-peace-prize/award-winner/2023-ljudmila-ulitzkaja/

Featured titles

Chekhov's Poetics (1971), a book of literary studies by Alexander Chudakov

Rights sold: World English rights - Ardis (reverted)

Originally published in Moscow in 1971, Chekhov's Poetics remains the best single-volume study devoted to Chekhov. In fact, anyone who attempts to stage or study Chekhov seriously must consult Cudakov—and the sooner the better.

Tightly and lucidly written, this relatively slender volume constitutes a gold mine of important facts, judicious commentaries, and sober judgments about Chekhov’s oeuvre—all substantiated by prodigious citations form the writer's work. Although demonstrating an impressive mastery of Russian and Western Chekhov scholarship, and occasionally quoting Chekhov’s letters, Chudakov depends exclusively on the stories and plays themselves to advance his persuasive arguments. We have here a close reading of Chekhov, meticulous in its detail but always cognizant of the larger issues which Chekhov’s complex, often elusive writing raises. The book is divided into two parts of almost equal length and moves from structure to idea in Chekhov. Part One (“Narrative Structure“) deals largely with Chekhov's use of the narrator, challenging the view that the writer's work shows little or no significant evolution. The frequently quantitative approach to Chekhov’s texts makes for some slow reading at first, but the results are highly rewarding—as witnessed by Cudakov’s marvelous extended analyses of “The Grasshopper” and “The Steppe." Part Two (“The Tangible World") concentrates on Chekhov's treatment of external reality, his major devices, and the role of ideas in his work. This section, which (quite uniquely) sees Chekhov “whole," i.e. as both prosaist and dramatist, offers the most compelling explanation available of so-called Chekhovian “disconnectedness," and insightfully demonstrates how Chekhov’s view of the individual differs radically from that offered by the literary tradition of Russia's major realists. Through frequent references to works by Turgenev. Goniarov, Dostoevskij, and Tolstoj, Cudakov builds up to one of his major conclusions about Cexov’s aesthetic system, namely that “(existence) is irrational and chaotic, its meaning and purposes are unknown and not subordinate to a visible idea. The nearer the created world is to that natural existence with all its chaotic, senseless and incidental forms, the more that world approaches absolute adogmatic reality. This is precisely the world of Chekhov.”

The Book of Legendary Lands - 2013

Rights sold: Russia - SLOVO

Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New York home of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s orchid-loving fictional detective, runs up against the resistance of fact. Wolfe’s house cannot be identified because Stout “always talked of a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street, but in the course of his novels he mentioned at least ten different street numbers – and what is more, there are no brownstones on 35th Street”. Using Eco’s typology, a fiction has been transmuted into a legend: “Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are in effect a modern invention, they have created flows of belief.” (from John Gray's review on English-language edition, full text http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2013/11/no-place-home)