The City of Nice is the guest of honor at the Saint Petersburg Book Fair, which will be held from April 26 to 29, 2012. This invitation is part of the “France-Russia 2012: Languages and Literatures” season that opened on January 25 in Moscow and will conclude in December in Paris.
Didier Van Cauwelaert, author of Double identité (Albin Michel), Bertrand Le Meignen for Soljenitsyne, sept vies en un siècle (Actes Sud), Olympia Alberti with L’amour dans l’âme, le journal disparu d’Etty Hillesum (Presse de la Renaissance), Aurélie de Gubernatis, Les gardiens du temps (Plon), Jacques Gantié, Guide Gantié 2011 (Rom), and Bernard Deloupy, Crim’au Cap (Gilletta) are the authors who will represent Nice at the Saint Petersburg Book Fair.
These authors have been selected by writer Raoul Mille, Municipal Councilor in charge of Literature.
Raoul Mille emphasizes, “Since the 19th century, France in general, and Nice in particular, have maintained close literary and intellectual ties with Russia. Chekhov, Gogol, Marie Bashkirtseff, and many other Russian authors have stayed and written in the Capital of the Riviera. We are honored to be welcomed in Saint Petersburg, and we also have great pleasure in inviting Russia to the Nice Book Festival. It is finally to pay tribute to them. Should we recall that Romain Gary’s mother was Russian?”
To illustrate modern Russian literature, it is in Nice, where the Russian colony was established as early as 1856, that the worthy heirs of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Turgenev, and Gogol will bear the colors of Russia as the guest of honor at the Nice Book Festival (June 8, 9, and 10, 2012):
They include Boris Akunin—an internationally celebrated novelist—The Falcon and the Swallow (Presse de la cité); Nikolai Kononov, Funeral of a Grasshopper (Le Cherche-Midi), Lev Rubinstein—an immense poet—Questions of Literature (Actes Sud); Olga Sedakova, Journey to Tartu and Back (Clémence Hiver); Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Our Tsar’s Subjects (Gallimard); Andrei Gelasimov, Rachel (Actes Sud); Dmitry Stakhov, The Retoucher (Actes noirs); and Michel Parfenov, director of the “Russian Letters” collection at Actes Sud and author of The Russian Kitchen (Actes Sud).
Between readings and conferences, Russia will again be evoked with Vladimir Fedorovski and Alexandre Adler, authors of The Novel of the Red Century (Le Rocher), sociologist Marek Halter, author of The Unknown Woman of Birobidzhan (Robert Laffont), or Claude Durand, former publisher, for his book Agent of Solzhenitsyn (Fayard) in which he recounts his adventure as a French publisher of the most illustrious contemporary Russian novelist. Conferences, meetings, and readings will also invite the public to a privileged dialogue allowing everyone to immerse themselves in Russian literature from past and present.
