Causa Artium works with the Debut Prize to bring a new group of Russia's most interesting young writers to America. They will read from their latest works and speak out on issues for which they are, indeed primary sources: art, politics and life in the world's most vast and volatile nation.

LITERARY READINGS and an OPEN PUBLIC DISCUSSION on art and Russia today.
***For the general English-speaking public. *** This event is FREE.***

IN WASHINGTON, D.C.
Date and Time: On Wednesday, 15 February 2012
* 4:30--6:00 pm: Discussion and Readings
* 6:00--7:30 pm: Reception with Refreshments and Light Fare
At Georgetown University, in the Intercultural Conference Center (ICC), conference room 462.

IN NEW YORK
Date and Time: On Saturday, 18 February 2012
* 2:30--4:00 pm: Discussion and Readings
* 4:00--5:00 pm: Reception with Refreshments and Light Fare
At the Main Building of the New York Public Library (the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building) located on Fifth Avenue at Forty-Second Street in the South Court Auditorium
Moderated by Leonard Lopate of NPR (WNYC Radio)

AT BARD COLLEGE
Date and Time: On Monday, 20 February 2012
* 6:00--7:30 pm: Discussion and Readings At the RKC Science Center, Room 103
* 8:00 pm: Reception with Refreshments and Light Fare at the Hannah Arendt Center located at 1448 Annandale Road.

IN BOSTON
Date and Time: On Wednesday, 22 February 2012
* 5:00--6:30 pm: Discussion and Readings
In the Belfer Case Study Room (Room S020) at the CGIS South Building (1730 Cambridge Street, on the Concourse level)
* 6:30 pm: Reception with Refreshments and Light Fare
In the Concourse at the CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street
Moderated by Adam Ragusea of NPR (WBUR Radio)

RUSSIA HAS ALWAYS FASCINATED THE WEST. Russia: sometime friend and frequent foe, Europe and Asia, home of militant atheism and spiritual depth, land of political extremism and literary genius.

Hidden for the West is how crucial this historical moment this is in the art and life of the Russian civilization, one of the world's great cultures. The Soviet and immediate post-Soviet generations had much in common, both obsessed with the heritage of the Soviet epoch. But now they are being displaced by a new generation, one for which the Soviet Union is mere history.

This generation has been raised in a new and different world, a Russia at once more and far less familiar to the West. They have a new set of hopes and fears, with different lives and aspirations. Theirs is a complex new Russia, one it is incumbent upon the West to understand.

Now this new generation of Russian writers comes to NYPL. Four young authors, finalists of the Debut Prize, read their works and discuss art and freedom in the world's most vast and volatile nation. Joining them is a leading figure in Russian letters, novelist and Debut coordinator Olga Slavnikova.

For over a decade, the Debut Prize has sought out young Russian-speaking literary talent the world over. Receiving as many as 70,000 submissions annually, Debut is a landmark in the Russian literary calendar. Come meet four of the prize's most exciting discoveries:

Olga Slavnikova grew up in Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountain region, the only daughter of a preeminent nuclear engineer in one of the Soviet Union's secret military cities. As a child she was a mathematical prodigy, but eventually turned to philology, becoming a professional journalist and editor.

Ms. Slavnikova's most ambitious work to date, 2017, takes a loves story and places it in the context of a new Russian civil war which breaks out on the anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. 2017 won Russia's most prestigious literary award, the Russian Booker Prize. The novel and has been translated into numerous languages, coming out in English in 2010.

Ms. Slavnikova's other novels include Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog, Alone in the Mirror and Immortal.

Slavnikova describes her literary method as "realist fantasy", inverting the mode associated with such writers as Marquez. Her latest novel, Light Head, endows the main character with a fantastic and inexplicable physical peculiarity, only to make him an utterly ordinary representative of a new and troubling socio-psychological type that has recently emerged in Russia. The English translation of Light Head is expected early in 2013.

Alisa Ganieva was born in 1985 in Moscow, but soon moved to her family's native Dagestan. Years later, she would be "born" in Moscow again as a writer, while her literature continued to revolve around her Dagestani world.

Ganieva's 2009 "Salam, Dalgat" was a stunning and controversial literary mystification. The tale was published as the work of Gulla Khirachev, a fighter in the war-torn Russian Caucasus. It exploded onto the literary scene and Khirachev was a star - until the Debut Prize awards. Khirachev was declared the winner and called to the podium, but in place of an rough and unkempt rebel in khakhis or camouflage, up to accept the award strode the slender and refined Ganieva.

A graduate of Moscow's prestigious Literary Institute, Ganieva has since won numerous awards for her prose and also the October magazine prize for her literary criticism. She is also the creator of her own new genre, a special kind of avant-garde children's tale.

Dmitry Biryukov was born in 1979 and lives in Novosibirsk's "Academic City". He has degrees in history and philosophy in addition to post-graduate work at the Institute of Philosophy and Law and the famous Literary Institute in Moscow.

Biryukov is the author of numerous short stories and essays. He recently completed his first novel, currently in press.

Biryukov's current project is a novel whose protagonist is an artist searching for the hidden meaning of one of the landmark works of 20th century art, Kasimir Malevich's 1915 "Black Square."

A journalist by trade, Biryukov recently left a position as editor-in-chief Science First-Hand to cover arts and culture.

Irina Bogatyreva was born in 1982 in Kazan, Tatarstan. In 2005, she graduated the prestigious Literary Institute in Moscow. She has been recognized by numerous literary awards and her stories and articles can be read in Russia's leading literary journals.

Bogatyreva writes on the most important issues for Russia's younger generation, including the freedoms offered by Russia's vibrant youth hitchhiking subculture, cults and the esoteric spirituality they appear to teach, and the magical appeal of Siberian unspoiled wilderness and the ancient civilizations that lived there. In every case, Bogatyreva is motivated by the search for inner freedom.

In that spirit, Bogatyreva's "Off the Beaten Track" struck a chord in Russia. "The tale is largely autobiographical," she explains. "The protagonists hitchhike from Moscow to the Altai, much as I once did. But from the day it was published, so many people saw themselves in my characters that I came to understand that it wasn't my story alone, but the story of everyone who had ever experienced the joys and the thrill of the open road."

Igor Savelyev was born in 1983 into a family of writers in Ufa in the southern Urals, where he still lives and works as a crime reporter for the local news agency. In 2004, his short novel Pale City became a cult classic for Russia's youth culture. Based on first-hand experience, the novel is an inside view of the new generation's yearning for independence, freedom and meaning.

Critics have raved about Savelyev's "masterful, finely chiseled style based on brilliant counterpoints, like a virtuoso music piece." In his works, "realism is bordering on phantasmagoria, a striking sample of new-generation psychological prose."

Savelyev received his degree in philology from Ufa University and is currently working on his dissertation on the topic of contemporary Russian literary criticism.

FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT CAUSA ARTIUM AT:

Contact@CausaArtium.org
1 (212) 203-0461

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More fully: OUR THANKS GO OUT TO

*GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY,
*THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY,
*ELIE WEITSMAN AND THE NYPL WORLD LANGUAGES COLLECTION,
*LEONARD LOPATE OF WNYC (NPR NEW YORK),
*EDWARD KASINEC,
*THE HARRIMAN INSTITUTE,
*COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY,
*BARD COLLEGE,
*THE HANNAH ARENDT INSTITUTE,
*ROGER BERKOWITZ,
*HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
*THE DAVIS CENTER,
*ADAM RAGUSEA (NPR BOSTON)
*THE OVERLOOK PRESS,
*PETER MAYER
*JACK LAMPLOUGH
and
ALL OF YOU WHO CAME OUT in DC last Wednesday, to Columbia U. on Friday, and especially to the New York Public Library on Saturday

FOR BEING PART OF THESE EXCITING AND IMPORTANT EVENTS!