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15 august 2018

Revision St Peterburg Book Festival

The inaugural “Revision” St Petersburg book festival will take place at New Holland from 6 to 9 September. A book fair focusing on intellectual literature, “Revision” is also a major event for the city, with a wide-ranging programme of activities. The festival will bring together a selection of the finest publishers, independent booksellers and libraries, as well as a range of other urban, public and virtual platforms and projects. With “New Holland: Cultural Urbanisation” as the organiser, the plan is for the festival to become an annual event with different themes and curators each year.

The festival will include the worldwide premier of Aleksandr Sokurov’s film Go.Go.Go., a public lecture by the Italian philosopher Paulo Virno entitled “Contemporary urban initiatives (and/or) societies as the non-state sphere of public life”, a roundtable discussion on “A paper version of everything”, “Literary cuisine” — a dinner with literary critics in the Kuznya House restaurant, the “Revision: urban societies” research exhibition, a conference entitled “The letter transforms us: Russian-language youth poetry in the 2010s”, “The great poetry readings”, special film-screenings, book presentations, author meets, as well as a programme of events for children from the “Mayak” school for the creative industries. A series of books entitled “The Petersburg Text” will be published especially for the festival, bringing together five local authors who in their various genres have created the mythology of St Petersburg in the 20th century. Among them are modernist writer Konstantin Vaginov, artist Alisa Poret, poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko, historian Yuri Piryutko and film director Aleksey Balabanov.

The central theme of the first “Revision” festival is “The Art of Doubting”. It is only through doubting the familiar and seemingly immutable that a person can create and invent new means and forms of interaction, or establish a new way of doing things. The festival programme focuses on the experience of the new, the other, and the unusual in contemporary culture, in urban society, in social history and in everyday life. The mission of “Revision” is to create a platform for the first international book festival in St Petersburg, a platform gathering together not only leading publishers of intellectual literature and independent booksellers, but also a whole host of urban initiatives working in the sphere of cultural enlightenment and advancement.

Festival curators — Konstantin Shavlovsky, Anna Izakar, Sasha Akhmadschina

Free admission.

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