The Russian government leverages the label “foreign agent” to tag individuals and groups that receive support from abroad or are (more vaguely) deemed to be under external influence. Those branded in this fashion face extensive reporting obligations and public labeling, restrictions on work, education, political involvement, and public activity, plus significant legal, financial, and social penalties that can make it hard to live and work within the country. It amounts to a kind of social and political death sentence, a coercive tool that suppresses independent journalism, civil society, and cultural voices by layering compliance demands and stigma on those who bear the tag.
Paradoxically, this designation has become, for some, a badge of distinction—and it sits comfortably with the Dar Prize, a literary award that recently marked its second cohort and is now inviting applications for its third cycle. In practice, the prize seeks to honor outstanding writing in the Russian language regardless of the writer’s citizenship or nationality. More importantly, winners receive translations into English, German, and French—the languages that shape the global book market—and thus gain access to readers around the world.
The Prize’s website articulates a vision of a world “where literature in Russian takes its rightful place in the world, being responsible to humanity, and not to dictatorships.”
I am, by temperament, typically wary of such grand ambitions—especially when they touch history, literature, and art, realms where I have long hoped one might discover solace or guidance. Yet in recent weeks, as I have delved into this year’s Dar Prize shortlist and winners, I find myself not only eagerly anticipating next year’s nominees but also gradually persuaded that the Prize’s aims—though bold—might not be out of reach.
Modern nationalism would have you believe that languages—and by extension literary traditions—are possessions that belong to one people or (more often) one state—theirs to control and define. But this is undoubtedly one of nationalism’s many lies.
Mikhail Shishkin, a co-founder of the Dar Prize and its jury chair, stands as one of the Russian language’s most formidable contemporary voices. Beyond his own distinction as a bearer of a “foreign agent” badge, he remains the only person to have won Russia’s three premier literary prizes: the Russian Booker Prize, the Russian National Bestseller (2005), and the Big Book Prize (2010). His assessment of the state of literature inside Russia today is stark. Responding to questions I sent by email, he wrote that “…living literature has been outlawed. Thousands of books are still published there, book fairs are still held, and literary prizes are still awarded, but for the past five years writers have largely pretended that everything is fine, that there is no war.” It is an immoral omission that the Dar Prize has sought to correct. All three of this year’s winners (the Jury awarded them after a three-way tie) confront the question of war and its consequences.
Alexandra Krashevskaya’s A Lullaby for Mariupol (Freedom Letters, 2024) perhaps addresses the issue more directly than any other entry. Krashevskaya offers a firsthand, surreal glimpse into the nearly three-month siege of her native city during the 2022 invasion. Structured as a non-chronological diary, A Lullaby for Mariupol defies genre, oscillating between fiction and reportage while remaining raw, visceral, and unsettled. Dreams anchor the book’s architecture, and the narrative’s destabilization lends it its potent force. As Krashevskaya explained in correspondence, “dreams most accurately convey what it feels like to exist within a war.” In other words, A Lullaby for Mariupol seeks to do the most essential thing: bear witness.
To bear witness to the horrors inflicted by forces that would strip us of our humanity may be one of the noblest acts a person can undertake; it is also a way to exonerate ourselves from moral guilt that we may not fully deserve. How culpable are we as individuals for the collective crimes of our nations and families? This is a struggle for many thoughtful Russians I know today, and it is a concern that should resonate with many more Americans as well.
And it is the central concern of the second Dar Prize-winning novel, Oleg Radzinsky’s Days of Repentance (BABooks 2024). The Naidenov family of Moscow seeks a life apart from the broader state and society, attempting to maintain a parallel existence that might have worked were it not for two intrusions. In the year Ukraine’s war erupts, the family’s world is jolted by the arrival of Daletskaya, the patriarch’s illegitimate daughter—a dwarf who gradually insinuates herself into the home, mirroring how state power—and then dependence on it, followed by loyalty to it—crept into ordinary Russians’ lives.
While it seems unthinkable now, in the midst not only of the war in Ukraine, but what seem like very dark days for humanity everywhere, there will one day be an after.
“Not every person can right the historical wrongs, but every person can choose how to behave when met by the individual choice,” Radzinsky wrote to me in an email. Our collective failure to acknowledge this moral fact could go a long way toward explaining the current state of affairs in much of the world. But the degree of personal responsibility we are each willing to accept is crucial for what follows after conflict. While it seems unthinkable now, in the midst not only of the war in Ukraine, but what seem like very dark days for humanity everywhere, there will one day be an after.
The third 2024–25 Dar Prize winner, Little Paradise by Ksenia Buksha (Freedom Letters, 2024), unfolds in the fictitious town of Rayok, set fifteen years after the end of a fictional war—in the still-to-come “after.” The plot centers on the disappearance of a fourteen-year-old boy, a child born after the fighting had finished. The atmosphere is quietly mystical—the missing boy turns out to be a prophetic figure who has gone to the mountains to seek understanding among old terrorist hideouts. In the end, the work reads less as a political novel than as a spiritual one.
Buksha offered a revealing answer when I asked about the book’s spiritual resonance: “As a Christian, I would put it this way: the very nature of love is divine.” That response compelled me to reread the novel with different eyes, reminding me that a deeply spiritual imagination can exist within modern Russian literature even when produced beyond the reach of the Russian state.
The three Dar Prize winners—and the works on the short list as well—demonstrate the evolving, complex canon shaping the contemporary Russian literary field. Ilya Danishevsky’s Damocles Techno (Freedom Press 2024) ranks among the most linguistically demanding and culturally intricate books I have read; I eagerly hope it will find English and other major-language translators, even as I worry about whether the right translator will be found. Igor Beloded’s short-story collection The Morning Was The Eye (Alpine Nonfiction 2024) is gloriously strange, offering both delight and a hefty challenge to any translator brave enough to take it on. And those are merely my preferred runners-up.
The Russian state has long aimed to silence its boldest and most innovative writers. Many have left the country to continue their work abroad, while the state—the insidious “Russky mir” doctrine—has attempted to claim ownership of the Russian language for itself. This campaign has succeeded to such an extent that former Soviet states have increasingly asserted language sovereignty, including Ukraine, where Russian recently lost protected status.
Nationalism would have you believe that languages—and thus literary traditions—are possessions of a single people or state, theirs to control. But this is among nationalism’s many falsehoods. French belongs to a Parisian reader as much as it does to a Nilotic woman in Kinshasa, and no one would demand that Ayi Kwei Armah stop writing in English or Ivonne Coñuecar cease publishing in Spanish. The same logic applies to Russian.
The Russian language and its literature do not belong to the Russian state, and certainly not to the Putin regime. The Dar Prize makes this truth a public project by doing more than celebrating writers who resist state commands; it also ensures their work travels across borders and into new literary traditions through translation, without support from the Russian state.
The authors recognized by the Dar Prize, each in their own way, are bearing witness to catastrophe. Yet in that act of recording destruction they are also giving birth to something alive. If Shishkin is correct that living literature has been outlawed inside Russia, then the future of Russian literature is already being written elsewhere. The Dar Prize simply acknowledges that fact.
