"Winter Road" led to victory in the "Big Book"

MOSCOW. In the Pashkov House winners of the Big Book Prize are named.

The documentary novel Winter Road by Leonid Yuzefovich about the campaign of the Siberian volunteer squad in Yakutia, the confrontation of white general Anatoly Pepelyaev and red commander Ivan Strod was evaluated by the jury for another literary award. To the "National Bestseller", the Stroganov Prize from Perm Fellowship), a grant for the translation and publication of a novel in the UK by "Russian Booker" on December 6 was also added the Big Book.

The names of the main contenders for the victory were clear after the announcement of the short list. The top three prize winners were not included in yet another book with a high reader rating - “Autochtones” by Maria Galina. The plot of the "Winter Road" by Yuzefovich is based on real events. We are talking about an anti-Bolshevik uprising in Yakutsk in 1921. The local population could not come to terms with the cruelty of the policy of war communism, the inhumanity of the surplus appropriations, the prohibitions on hunting, trade, executions without trial, and the forcible sending to gold mines as a free labor force. White officers who still remained at that time in the Far East responded to the call for help from the Yakut intelligentsia.

This is the second Big Book for Leonid Yuzefovich. He received the previous one in 2009 for the novel Cranes and Dwarfs. The third place and the prize of readers’ sympathy for the family saga “Jacob’s Ladder” was held by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, the owner of the Big Book of 2007 for the novel “Daniel Stein, Translator”. The second prize is awarded to Aviator Evgeny Vodolazkin. The main character of the book, Innokenty Platonov, who turned out to be an experimental rabbit in the cryonic experiment in Solovki in 1932 and thawed at the end of the 20th century, is trying to find himself in the new time.

Elena Tanakova © Gallerix.ru