Vadim Levental
Quick Study: Vadim Levental is an active participant in numerous branches of Russia's literary world, writing fiction and criticism, editing his own imprint at a publishing house, and serving as secretary of the National Bestseller Award.
The Levental File: Although Levental began publishing in Russian "thick" journals in the early 2000s, he first gained wide recognition in the 2010s for compiling and editing a four-volume Literary Matrix set that collects essays by contemporary Russian writers about Russian literary classics. The Matrix books achieved national fame as one of the most successful literary projects of the post-Soviet period. Levental’s first novel, Masha Regina (2012), the portrait of a young woman from a small city who becomes a world-famous film director, was shortlisted for the Big Book prize and translated into English; his second book, a collection of stories called The Fright Room, came out in 2015. Levental is executive secretary of the National Bestseller Prize and coordinator of the Grigoriev Poetry Prize; in 2016, he represented Russia at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Psssst….........: Levental’s non-literary jobs have included loader, waiter, designer, bank clerk, and TV actor... In the late 2010s, Levental started his own imprint, Vadim Levental’s Bookshelf, at publishing house Fluid; notable authors he’s published include Sergei Nosov, Pavel Krusanov, Elena Dolgopyat, and Olga Pogodina-Kuzmina... Levental studied acting in college, but eventually majored in literary criticism and editing at St. Petersburg State University... As editor at Limbus Press, Levental edited a variety of books and collections, from Victor Hugo’s essays to an anthology of short stories about soccer...
Levental’s Places: St. Petersburg, though he was born in Leningrad.
The Word on Levental: Noted critic Lev Danilkin wrote this about Masha Regina in 2012: “Levental has the ear of a mature poet, the lungs of a hammerman, and the mind of a young mathematician. This isn’t wit, but precisely a great mind, the wisdom of a philosopher. We have here a master, a real one, on the level of the early Bitov: you’d never say that this is the debut novel of a thirty-one-year-old man. He’s from Petersburg, though, and that does explain certain things.”
Levental on Learning to Write: “[When I was planning to study writing after high school] I asked the director of my school for advice: would it be better for me to go to the Literary Institute in Moscow, or to remain in St. Petersburg and study in the languages and literatures department of St. Petersburg State University? He said, ‘The department here, Vadim. Of course. What is the Literary Institute, anyway? People sit there in the dorm cleaning their pistols, drinking vodka, and getting ready for world revolution. You go to the department here: you’ll get an education.’ And I don’t regret it one bit.”
Levental on St. Petersburg: “I grew up in the outskirts of Petersburg, and my feelings for the places of my childhood are a complicated cocktail of both nostalgic tenderness and panicked horror at how monstrous those places are.”
Levental on Language: “Language is a mill-stone that grinds up anything that goes into it. … It’s simply impossible to return language to some previous position; it develops on its own, you can’t force it by any external means. That’s just useless. But the fact that people these days can’t produce correct Russian—now that’s a problem. After all, the act of writing isn’t just noting down sounds, it’s the whole framework of thought.”
Levental on Writing about the Siege of Leningrad: “The story “The Angel’s Share” is dedicated to my grandmothers, Blockade survivors. While you can chuckle along with the other stories [collected in A House of Fears], the topic of Leningrad during the Blockade requires a quite prayerful mindset. To prepare yourself to approach this topic, you need to fast.”