The winners of the “Star Ticket” award were Vasily Natsentov and Bulat Khanov

(KZN.RU, September 13, Ekaterina Vislavskaya). Poet Vasily Natsentov and writer Bulat Khanov became laureates of the “Star Ticket” Award in 2018. Traditionally, the award ceremony was held in Kazan during the opening ceremony of the annual festival “Aksenov-fest”. The authors were congratulated in the KRK “Pyramid” by the members of the Board of Trustees of the festival.

The ceremony was opened by the performance of Elias Fingersh, the musician, the “golden trombone of Sweden”. Fans of Vasily Aksenov's works, laureates of the “Star Ticket” Award of the past years, and people who knew Vasily Aksenov personally gathered in the hall. Ilsur Metshin, the Mayor of Kazan, Natalia Fishman, an assistant to the President of the RT, Razil Valeev, the deputy of the State Council of the RT, Azat Abzalov, the head of the Kazan Department of Culture, and others also attended the event.

After the theatrical prolog, the musician Andrey Makarevich went on the stage with a song “I broke on the asphalt ...”, dedicated to Vladimir Vysotsky, who was also a friend of Vasily Aksenov. Elmira Ivanyan, a member of the Aksenov-fest, read the dedication of Bella Akhmadulina to Vladimir Vysotsky, after which Yves Gauthier appeared on the stage. He read his own thoughts about the similarities between Vasily Aksenov and Vladimir Vysotsky, and then gave the floor to the presenter, who announced the beginning of the ceremony of awarding the laureates.

Evgeny Popov, the chairman of the Aksenov-fest Board of Trustees, and Irina Barmetova, the festival coordinator, board member, went on the stage. They awarded young authors.

“Over the years of the existence of this award, it has been awarded to people who now truly are the core of our new literature”, said Evgeny Popov. Irina Barmetova greeted the new members of the Board of Trustees: Vadim Abdrashitov, Guzel Yakhina, and Denis Osokin.

Guzel Yazina announced the name of the winner in the nomination “Prose”. Bulat Khanov received the award for the story “Dysthymia”. “Bulat writes about the present. His works are woven from the realities of today: flash mobs, Instagram, Facebook, treatment for porn addiction, gay parades, selfie, smoothies – that's all there is in his works”, she said. “This is very valuable, because, there are not enough good novels about modernity”.

Bulat Khanov himself, taking the statuette and badge of the laureate, pointed to one important coincidence. In his Ph.D. thesis, he devoted a whole paragraph to Vasily Aksenov, and this year his work was first published in the journal “October”, with which the writer cooperated. “Young authors who enter the literature in 2010 have a kind of kinship with the Sixtiers, rather symptomatic than genetic. Today young writers turn to civil prose, and the Sixtiers in this regard are very interesting. Because they do not do it directly, some kind of a journalistic gesture, but always approach it in very fantastic form, parable form, metaphor. And it's great when the form does not slow down the content. Therefore, I would like to say that we will write about reality, but we will not talk about it directly”, he said.

The winner in the nomination “Poetry” was invited to the stage by writer Denis Osokin, who once received this award himself.

“The long-awaited “Aksenov-fest” was opened again. My dear people and I are always looking forward to this festival and we consider it to be the main literary event in the life of our city”, he said. “There is magic in the poems of our laureate. All poets work with mythical essential oils, and I felt these oils in the poems of Vasily Natsentov”. The poet himself, having appeared on the stage, read out his poem as a thank-you.

At the end of the first section, the Jazz Orchestra “Aksenov Band” directed by Yuri Shcherbakov performed for the Kazan citizens, and Andrey Makarevich took the stage for the entire second section.

Vasily Natsentov was born in 1998 in a scientific town in the Talovsky district of the Voronezh region on the territory of the Kamennaya Step’ reserve. At school, he studied birds and traveled a lot. When the future poet was 10 years old, the district newspaper published his first article on an acute ecological and social theme, and at the age of 15 he became a freelance correspondent for the regional newspaper, spoke on local television, and conducted lectures for schoolchildren. At the same time, Vasily Natsentov managed to work as an auxiliary worker, watchman, and camp leader. Now he is a student of the faculty of geography, geoecology, and tourism of the Voronezh State University. He is engaged in scientific work, in particular, a fairly new topic of interpenetration and interaction of the artistic image and landscape structure of the area. At different times, his poetic works were published in the magazines “Pod’em”, “Nash Sovremennik”, “Oktyabr’”, “Moskva”, “Koltso “A”, “Sibirskie Ogni”. He is a participant of the Meeting of Young Writers of the Union of Writers of Moscow in 2017 and the Winter School of Poets within the framework of the International Festival of Arts of Yuri Bashmet in 2018.

Another laureate of the prize was Bulat Khanov, a prose writer, literary critic. He was born in Kazan in 1991. In 2013, he graduated from the Philological Faculty of the Kazan Federal University, and in 2016 he also presented his thesis on “Conceptualization of Soviet discourse in contemporary Russian prose”. He is known as the three-time participant of the Young Writers' Forums in Lipki, the finalist of the Russian-Italian Rainbow Prize, the laureate of the Lyceum Prize, the author of the blog “Pretty Grids. Book reviews”, the author of the novel “Irregular magnitudes” and the story “Dysthymia”. He was published in the journals “Druzhba Narodov”, “Oktyabr’”, “Idel”, “Kazan”. He does a lot of hitchhiking.

In 2017, the winners of the “Star Ticket” Award were the poet Grigory Medvedev and the musician and composer from Sweden Elias Fingersh. The ceremony was held at the G. Kamal Theater. Then the prize was awarded in the nominations “Literature” and “Music”. This year the laureates of past years decided to make the Club of Star Ticket, and newcomers will join it.