June 27, 7:30 pm
Alexey Konakov is a St Petersburg-based critic and essayist, whose articles have been published in such periodicals as the New Literary Observer, Novy Mir and the [Translit] almanac. He is the author of Vtoraya Vnenakhodimaya. Outlines of the USSR’s Unofficial Literature, for which he was awarded the 2016 Andrey Bely prize for Criticism. The book is an important piece of research into the field of the Soviet literary underground, as represented by poets and writers including Igor Kholin, Evgeniy Kharitonov, Pavel Ulitin and Leon Bogdanov. During his Literary Club lecture, Konakov will talk about Leon Bogadanov’s book Notes on tea-parties and earthquakes.
Admission is free of charge. The number of participants is limited. Please register in advance.
A series of meetings for people interested in contemporary prose and poetry will include theoretical lectures on literature and book presentations as well as short poetry and prose readings. Every writer who has been invited to the literary readings is connected in some way either with St Petersburg itself or with the writing that the city inspired. In this way, one of the programme’s thematic tenets will be the interaction between the city and the text, characters and heroes of prose fiction and research works. This is further enhanced by the particular mythical richness of New Holland island, located on the border with St Petersburg’s Kolomna, the city’s most important “literary” region.
Along with the most important and influential representatives of the St Petersburg literary scene, also invited to take part are authors whose creative and research interests are connected to an extent with the reevaluation of St Petersburg’s writings, its history and mythology. Writers including Alexander Ilyanen, Alexander Skidan, Pavel Pepperstein, Alexandra Petrova, Lev Danilkin and Alexey Konakov will address the meetings’ audiences.
