Causa Artium literary events, unless otherwise noted, are aimed at English speakers. This event was in English and Russian.

IN MANHATTAN
Date and Time: On Wednesday, 25 May 2011, at 6:45pm
At the Jerry Orbach Theater (entrance on the south side of West 50th Street)
located on the third floor at 1627 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

IN NEW JERSEY
Date and Time: On Friday, 20 May 2011, at 6:30pm
At the Museum of Russian Art (MoRA)
located at 80 Grand Street, Jersey City, NJ 07302

IN BROOKLYN
Date and Time: On Sunday, 22 May 2011, at 1:30pm
At the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Library building in the Dweck Center
located at 10 Grand Army Plaza, Brooklyn, NY 11238

Olga Slavnikova grew up in the city of Ekaterinburg in the Ural mountain region. She graduated from the Ural University with a degree in journalism. Her first novel, A Dragonfly Enlarged to the Size of a Dog, made the short list for the Russian Booker Prize in 1997; it immediately raised her to the top ranks of Russian literature. Her second novel was Alone in the Mirror, which made the short list of the Anti-Booker Prize and was the winner of the Pavel Bazhov Prize. She then won the Critics’ Academy prize for Immortal, which was also shortlisted for the Belkin and the National Bestseller prizes. Her critical essays have won her the Polonsky Prize.

2017, her magnum opus, recently won her the Russian Booker Prize and has been translated into many languages; last year, the novel was published in English translation. Her latest novel is Light Head, issued last December.

Praise for 2017

“Slavnikova’s characters are magnetizing, and her crystal clear vision of a world in which ‘commercial infinities’ choke off humanism and art is salubriously caustic.”– Booklist

“A pot brimming with precious stones, a dash of spy novel intrigue, and a raw-to-the-bone social critique bubbling and boiling in a dense, evocative stew.” – Three Percent

“History seems to collide with the present and manifest itself physically in this novel. “Mountain Spirits” and even an occasional ghost also glide through the pages. Olga Slavnikova’s Russia of 2017 is an ugly consumer-driven society far removed from the dream of a proletarian utopia that sparked a revolution 100 years earlier.” – New York Journal of Books

“Slavnikova’s novel 2017, set one hundred years after the 1917 Russian Revolution, is an imagined amalgamation of Russia’s near future and its conflicted past… Though the plot twists can be outlandish, Slavnikova’s sensitivity to detail, character, and the human condition keeps 2017 clear in the reader’s mind, long after the excursion is over.” – Foreword

“2017 is a novel of ideas in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, yet set in the mineral- and myth-rich Urals. Slavnikova’s prose is dauntingly dense but the payoff is well worth it.” – Russian Life