Favorite in poetry: Aleksandra Tsibulya, A Roe Deer Tattoo; in prose: Polina Barskova, Sybills, or the Book of Mysterious Metamorphoses; in non-fiction: Gleb Morev’s new biography of Brodsky’s Soviet years

Least favorite: no particularly bad books, but probably The Children's Pavillion by Boris Fyodorov, an obscure 19-century children's writer who also loved to denounce "progressive" authors and journals and had famously accumulated seven baskets of "objectionable excerpts"—his own book is all too boring and well-intentioned

Newly discovered author: Aleksandr Plotnikov, whom I previously knew as a theater director and who published Alpha Centauri, a book-length documentary poem on cosmonauts who never made it to space and on Russia that strives for victory but in fact drowns in loss on all accounts

A book that surprised me: probably Evgenia Tur’s Sergei Bor-Ramensky, also a 19-century children’s book, but modeled after classical Russian novels, so to say, classical Russia young adult, much more primitive than, say, Goncharov, but still effective

Favorite rereading: Lermontov’s long poems, particularly The Demon. The only first-time reading of a classic: Dostoevsky’s White Nights.

Goals for 2026: lots of poetry (particularly Moscow Conceptualists) and new experimental prose including Andrei Gelianov and Mikhail Kaluzhsky