Russian World is the World of Russian Literature

I could never imagine such a powerful uniting role of the Russian literature. Of course, we did know about the meaning of Leo Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and also Turgenev, Bunin, Chekhov, Pushkin and Gorky for the world culture. But these are the examples of the great Russian literature, a Russian contribution to the world cultural heritage, into the greatest deeds of the humankind and humanism. However, it was just a little while ago when I realized, that Russian literature is also a special code, a “special matter”, which unites Russian and Russian-speaking people, Russian diasporas; it constitutes one of the most important bases of the “Russian World”.    

You start feeling this very deeply, when you become a chief editor of “Golden Fleece” Literary Journal at first, and then of the literary e-portal with the same name. Our project was designed to be an ordinary literary journal, although we did have ambitious hopes to gather great authors. Later, time has shown the line of our further development to create an electronic portal, which would become a place to meet for Russian-speaking authors all over the world.

I’d like to mention that we continue publishing “Golden Fleece” Literary Journal and we still invite authors, but the electronic portal is more accessible and it is quicker. One of the portal’s focuses is not just publishing authors from different countries, but we aim at also telling how Russian literature is coping and surviving in different countries. We say “Russian literature”, but we mean a wider term – Russians, Russian diasporas, as literature is a mirror, which reflects all the rest.  

The e-portal was not only designed to be a literary one: we have such sections, as “History”, “Culture”, “Publications” and others; there are many interesting materials, but it was presented as a literary one, in the first place. It may perhaps be natural – the majority of our editorial board consists of writers, poets, critics and our authors are mostly literary writers.

What comes to readers – we have more or less regular readers in almost fifty countries: in the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Israel, Australia, Spain, Portugal, Bulgaria, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Mongolia – everywhere, where people speak and read Russian. It is surprising, how many Russian and Russian-speaking people are into literature – they write, publish magazines, newspapers, take part in festivals; every year “literary tourism” is spreading.  

We publish works of relevant genres in sections “Prose”, “Poetry”, “Critics”, “Satire and Humour”. Prosaic authors are Roman Senchin, Leonid Podolskiy (the author of these words), Sergey Sokurov, Viktor Grishin (Cyprus), Leonid Zhuhovitskiy, Olga Natsarenus, Olga Ilnitskaya (Russia-Ukraine), Valentin Reznik, Roman Kamburg (Israel), Irina Feshchenko-Skvortsova (Portugal), forthcoming works by Boris Volok (USA), Elena Furmanova (USA), Lev Altmark (Israel). Among poets there are Evgeniy Rein, Zinoviy Valshonok, Kirill Kovaldzhi, Evgeniy Lesin, Anna Gedymin, Valentin Reznik, Andrey Galamaga, Viktor Shirokov, Gennadiy Kalashnikov, Aleksandr Karpenko, Stanislav Aydinyan, Marina Kario, Galina Bogapeko, Natasha Krofts (Austarlia), Irina Kaverina (USA), Svetlana Mashevich, Efim Gammer, (Israel), Ilya Liruzh, Norah Crook and Inga Daugaviete (both from Australia), Servei Glavatskiy (Ukraine), Aleksandr Tsygankov, Aleks Trudler (Israel), Alena Shcherbakova, Valeriy Sukharev, Ilya Reiderman (all from Ukraine) and many others.  

We also have a special section “Young Poets” in the portal hosted by Evgeniya ‘Jan’ Baranova; works by poets from former Soviet republics are also published there. Section “Critics” has interesting researches:  about Iosif Brodsky and Anna Akhmatova by Evgeniy Rein; Evgeniy Evtushenko, Svetlana Alaksievich, Leonid Podolskiy and Boris Minayev by Lev Annenskiy; Zakhar Prilepin by Leonid Podolskiy; Vyacheslav Ivanov, Konstantin Vaginov, N. Ognev by Viktor Shirokov; Iosif Brodskiy by Lev Altermark (Israel) and other.  

There is a special section “Russia and the World” in the portal, where our special correspondents Galina Itskovich and Natasha Krofts tell about foreign countries (USA, India, Australia, Peru, Singapore), but the majority of materials in this section is dedicated to the Russian émigré literature and about Russian authors, who ended up living far away from their motherland by a twist of fate.  

Natasha Krofts’s article “History of Russian Literature in Australia” and her interview with the oldest Russian  émigré poet Australian Norah Crook are of a great interest; exciting materials are also Galina Itskovich’s interview with Aleksandr Pushkin, chief editor of “Slovo” magazine and with Irina Mashinskaya, chief editor of “Storony Sveta” magazine; chief editor of “Interpoeziya” magazine Andrey Gritsman’s article about how Russian literature and poetry survived in foreign and, as one would think, alien lands. Interview with Yuriy Moor-Muradov, chairman of Israel’s Russian-Speaking Authors Union by the author of this article, is also one of the series.  

I’d also like to tell about our direct contacts – performances of Russian poets Inna Baginskaya and Irina Mashinskaya in Saint Petersburg and Moscow this summer – we wrote about them and made announcements in our portal.