Thu 19 August 2010
Presentation
GLAS And The New Russian Writing

Language: In Russian with English translation

Winners of the Debut Prize for fiction: SQUARING THE CIRCLE.
Glas presents the English edition of their first anthology of Debut winners. Six young Russian authors will voice their views of the world: Alisa Ganieva (pen name Gulla Khirachev), Arslan Khasavov, Polina Klyukina, Alexander Gritsenko, Victor Puchkov. The evening will be introduced by Olga Slavnikova and Natasha Perova. This will be followed by readings from the authors’ works in Russian and in English. There will be an opportunity to put questions to this group of contemporary authors.

Also participating is Olga Slavnikova, director of the Debut Prize.

BOOKS ON SALE

Natasha Perova, founder, owner and publisher of Moscow-based GLAS, publishes translations into English of contemporary Russian writers. Surviving on a shoestring with no outside funding, though with some help in kind from friends and family, Perova aims to “explain to those even remotely interested in Russian literature, what is available, what are the current trends, movements, ideas and debates.” She sees GLAS, including its website, as a database and “a rich source of publishing ideas for publishers and agents, literary specialists and students, and the general reader interested in international fiction.”

Perova started her publishing career at Progess Publishers and later joined the English-language magazine Soviet Literature, eventually becoming its editor-in-chief. After the collapse of communism, like all those involved in the arts, she soon realized that freedom came with a price: no more State censorship, but no more State subsidies either. She was determined to continue promoting Russian writers, and after Soviet Literature closed down, as many state-owned institutions in the 1990s, she started up GLAS (which means “voice”), using the British magazine Granta as her model. A high-profile launch was planned for the first issue, an anthology on “Revolution: the 1920s and 1980s”, at “two huge international events in Moscow – the International Library Congress and the Congress of Ex-Compatriots”. But fate intervened in the form of the 19 August coup. “The events took place around and across the river from the seat of Parliament, so the streets were barricaded and there was shooting. I had to carry the books in a knapsack and found myself pacifying the delegates instead of talking about my wonderful new project!”

So the launch was postponed, and “major activities started in 1992, with the publication of the second issue”, an anthology devoted to “young people’s rebellion against the establishment”. Initially four GLAS volumes appeared each year, but the usual rhythm nowadays is twice a year: “It depends on the availability of money. I sell books, sell rights, save money. As soon as there’s enough money, I publish a book. It disciplines me that I must be ready with information twice a year for the distributors” – Inpress in Britain, who handle orders for small publishers, and Northwestern University Press in the US.

She is disarmingly frank about her early struggles: “You can’t imagine how ignorant I was! I was a very experienced editor, and knew everything about books up to distribution, but nothing about them from then on, so there was a lot of trial and error.” She found “there were so many authors I wanted to publish. So many who’d been banned or censored.” So it was “logical and inevitable” to start with anthologies, and the first sixteen volumes are multi-authored.

When she had published “most of the big names that had accumulated”, Perova began focusing on individual writers, though she still compiles the occasional anthology, like Strange Soviet Practices, short stories illustrating “typically Soviet phenomena”, or War & Peace by ten of Russia’s younger writers or Captives, a thought-provoking collection of contemporary stories.

The above is an abridged version of Vivienne Menkes’ article about Glas from Publishing News in 2008.)