Liberty Prize

2011

Stephen Cohen

Stephen Cohen is an American scholar of Russian studies. His academic work concentrates on developments in Russia since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the country’s relationship with the United States.

Cohen is well known in both Russian and American circles. Since 1998, Cohen has been professor of Russian Studies and History at New York University, where he teaches a course titled Russia Since 1917. He previously taught at Princeton University. He has written several books including those listed below. He is also a CBS News consultant as well as a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

2010

Vladimir Vasiliev

Vladimir Vasiliev is a premier dancer who has made amazing contributions to the development of classical male dance.

Vladimir Vasiliev one of the great Russian dancers is the only dancer to be given the title “World’s Best Dancer” by the Paris Dance Academy. But these days he is busy earning another title – that of a painter! His attitude towards painting is that of a professional artist – one who paints because he can’t live without it.

But coming back to his skills as a dancer, Vasiliev was born in Moscow in 1940, graduated from the Moscow Ballet School in 1958 and joined the Bolshoi Ballet. Russia’s influential ballet critic Fedor Lopukhov called him “God of the dance … A miracle in art, perfection.”

2009

Irina Antonova

Irina Aleksandrovna Antonova (born 20 March 1922, Moscow) has been Director of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow since 1961, making her the oldest director of a major art museum in the world.

Among her many awards and decorations are the State Prize of the Russian Federation and the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

2008

Vladimir Gandelsman

A native of St. Petersburg and resident of the Bronx, Vladimir Gandelsman has authored nine poetry books and translated volumes by Wallace Stevens, James Merrill and Dr. Seuss, among others. He is also editor-in-chief of Ars Interpres, a publication dedicated to the translation of contemporary American poetry. Joseph Brodsky held Gandelsman’s work in high regard.

Dmitry Muratov

Dmitry Muratov is editor-in-chief of “Novaya Gazeta”, the only truly critical newspaper with national influence in Russia today. He founded the paper in 1993 and is still its driving force.
Novaya Gazeta is known for its in-depth investigations on sensitive issues such as high-level corruption, human rights violations, and abuse of power. In 2007 Dmitry Muratov was honored with International Press Freedom Award.

2007

Alexei German

The Russian film director Alexei German is one of the most authoritative masters in contemporary cinema. The director’s focus on the issues of history and time reveals itself in the two most evident peculiarities of his films: they are almost all black-and-white, like the newsreels of the 1930-50s; in each of them German resorts to a method rarely used in cinema – a character’s look straight into the camera directly connects the viewer with the screen world.

The exceptional director became famous after the release of the film “Dvadtsat dney bez voyny” (Twenty Days Without War). One of German’s great accomplishments was “Moy drug Ivan Lapshin” (My Friend Ivan Lapshin) and “Khrustalyov, mashinu!” (Khrustalyov, My Car!).
Alexei German lives and works in St. Petersburg.

Dmitry Prigov

Dmitry Prigov – Russian poet and artist, who was a leading member of the Russian artistic avant-garde and of the Moscow conceptualism movement in the 1970s and ’80s. His texts subverted Socialist Realism, and most were parts of thematic cycles. Prigov’s work was published underground (as samizdat) in the Soviet Union and openly abroad for years, but his first verse collection was not officially published in his home country until 1990. In addition to more than 30,000 poems he wrote plays and essays.

Vladimir Spivakov

Vladimir Spivakov is famous in Russia as one of the eminent violinists, the founder and conductor of “Moscow virtuosi” chamber orchestra.

Spivakov is world famous for his brilliant performances as recitalist, guest soloist and guest conductor of leading orchestras throughout the world and for his humanistic activities. He played with a great number of orchestras, under Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti, Seiji Ozawa, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini.

In February 1975, Vladimir Sivakov made his New York debut. In 1979 he made his debut as a conducter with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival. Soon after that, in the same year, he founded the Moscow Virtuosi, with which he appeared both as violinist and conductor throughout the world, and which quickly became one of the world leading chamber orchestras.

In May 1994 Vladimir Spivakov established the Vladimir Spivakov International Charity Foundation to support young talented musicians, painters and dancers in Russia. Since its inception 500 young musicians have received support, in a form of musical instruments, art supplies and ballet equipment in addition to receiving an academic education.

Vladimir Spivakov has been decorated with Russia’s highest prize, the National Cultural Heritage Award, and is Ambassador of the Arts for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In 1999, France officially recognized his contribution to the influence of music and culture by awarding him the title of “Officier des Arts et des Lettres” (Officer of Arts and Letters).

2006

Vladimir Ashkenazy

Icelandic pianist of Russian origin, he made his début in Moscow in 1945 and also studied there. After competition successes, he toured the USA in 1958; in 1963 he settled in England, moving to Iceland in 1968.

Vladimir Ashkenazy is a passionate interpreter of Russian music (notably Rakhmaninov), he also brings warmth and sincerity to the Romantic repertory and particular sensitivity and clarity to Mozart.

An internationally recognized solo pianist, chamber music performer, and concert conductor, Vladimir Ashkenazy has made music with some of the most prestigious orchestras and soloists. His virtuoso recordings have earned him five Grammy awards plus Iceland’s Order of the Falcon.

2005

Gidon Kremer

Gidon Kremer is the first musician which is awarded with the Liberty prize since it was founded.
The world-famous artist, a graduate of Moscow’s famous school of violin of David Oistrakh, Kremer has made an invaluable contribution to bringing of contemporary composers’ works from Russia and former Soviet Union on the territory of the USA.

His in-depth interpretations of Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Part, Giya Kancheli, Vasks and Peters works, many of which are devoted to Kremer as their first and best performer, helped to open to Western listeners a unique originality and philosophical significance of this music. We note in particular the Kremer’s role in the revival of the musical heritage of the deceased in Princeton legendary futurist, a friend of Anna Akhmatova Arthur Lourie. Thanks to Kremer violin music by American composers Leonard Bernstein, Philip Glass, John Adams is widely known in Russia.

Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin is the brightest star of the Moscow Conceptual School. During the last three decades of hard work Sorokin wrote a number of important books (starting with the early novels – “The Thirtieth Mary’s love” and “Norma”), which largely determined the development of post-Soviet literature. Novelist par excellence, he successfully works in different genres – from the theater (over 10 pieces) and screenplays (“Moscow”, “Kopeyka”, “4”) to the libretto of acclaimed opera “The Rosenthal’s Children”.
“Enfant terrible” of the new Russian culture, Sorokin always gives the cause for discussions, and that only emphasizes its crucial role in changing literary paradigm.

Sorokin is well known in Europe (especially – in Germany) and in Japan, but not widely represented in America. An independent jury hopes that the “Liberty Award ” will draw attention of American readers to Sorokin’s work, and will open his books entirely new to Russian literature itself.

2004

Mikhail Baryshnikov

Mikhail Baryshnikov was born of Russian parents, in Riga, Latvia, where he began studying ballet. He was accepted by the Vaganova School in Leningrad and studied under the renowned teacher Alexander Pushkin.

At 18, he entered the Kirov Ballet as a soloist and remained with the company from 1968 to 1974, when he left Russia. From 1974 to 1979, he danced with ballet and modern companies around the world. He was a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet from 1979 to 1980, and from 1980 until 1989 he was artistic director of American Ballet Theatre. From 1990 to 2002, Mr. Baryshnikov was director and dancer with the White Oak Dance Project, which he co-founded with choreographer Mark Morris.

David Remnick

David Remnick is the editor of The New Yorker. He had been a staff writer at the magazine since September, 1992, and has written over a hundred pieces for the magazine. Subjects have included such people as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Shimon Peres, Ralph Ellison, Katharine Graham, Pope John Paul II, Michael Jordan, and George Stephanopoulos.

Mr. Remnick joined The New Yorker after ten years at the Washington Post. In 1988, he started a four-year tenure as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, “Lenins Tomb.” In April, 1994, “Lenins Tomb” received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism.

In February, 1997, Random House published “Resurrection,” Mr. Remnicks book on the struggle to build a Russian state from the ruins of the Soviet empire, and the first book to cover the recent elections in Russia.

2003

Lev Rubinstein

Born in 1947 in Moscow, Lev Rubinstein worked as a librarian while he took part in the Russian literary underground, a job that at least partly inspired his use of the index card as poetic medium. Rubinstein’s central importance to the Russian avant-garde, and his artistic affinities with international experimental poetry, make him an essential figure in both Russian and world poetry; that he has been translated into German, French, Swedish, Polish, and English indicates the already-existing regard for his achievements. Rubinstein’s poetic texts, which were first published in the West in the 1970s, ten years earlier than in Russia, are written on a series of index cards, often mirroring or distorting the various discourses of language. His poetic work reads, in his words, at times like a realistic novel, at times like a dramatic play, at times like a lyric poem, etc., that is, it slides along the edges of genres and, like a small mirror, fleetingly reflects each of them, without identifying with any of them. This genre is, in essence, a hybrid, combining poetry, prose, drama, visual art, and performance. Rubinstein’s work naturally invites multi-media interpretations; these flash renderings of his texts are but one rather successful permutation of his pliable work.

A laureate of the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize (the prize for which is famously one rouble and a bottle of vodka), Rubinstein is an accomplished poet with a sharp eye for unusual detail. His innovative use of “found poetry” and “poems on index cards” were refreshing and unique in the surge of “new literature” after the fall of Communism. He is also a keen essayist; his columns for publications such as Itogi, Esquire and grani.ru are extremely popular and his recent book of collected essays Zeitgeists, has earned well-deserved praise from critics and readers alike.

Irina Prokhorova

Irina Dmitrievna Prokhorova is the founder, editor and publisher of the journal New Literary Review and the publishing house of the same name. New Literary Review focuses on the theory and history of literature, literary criticism and bibliography.

She received her education at Moscow State University, where she specialized in English and American Literature and wrote and defended her thesis on English modernism. She also worked for TV, contributed at the same time to various literary magazines and taught English at the University.

The title of her paper at the Stanford Conference will be “Journals, Publishing, and the Institutionalisation of Culture in New Russia”.

Viktor Golyshev

Viktor Golyshev (born 1937) is a well known English-to-Russian translator. His translations include Light in August, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, All the King’s Men, Theophilus North, 1984, Other Voices, Other Rooms, Set This House on Fire, Pulp, and others. He has won the Foreign Literature and Illuminator awards. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Golyshev initially scoffed at an offer to translate the fifth book in J. K. Rowling’s bestselling series (“Hell no, what am I, 8 years old?”), and saying about modern American literature in general, “It isn’t quite worthy of consideration. It has almost nothing to say about life.” However, he subsequently joined a team of translators employed by the Russian publisher of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix after complaints of poor translation. He has not been part of the translating team for any of the other Harry Potter books.

2002

Thomas Krens

Director of the Guggenheim (Museum) Foundation, 1988-2008. Krens entered Williams College, Williamstown, MA, initially studying economics and then political science.

After receiving his B.A. from Williams in 1969, he played basketball in Europe. He returned to the U.S. and received a master’s degree in studio art from the State University of New York (SUNY), Albany in 1971, joining his alma mater, Williams in 1972 as an adjunct faculty in the printmaking department, later becoming assistant professor.

Krens directed the artist in residence program at Williams between 1976 and 1980. He was named the director of the Museum of Art, Williams College, in 1981. Instead of pursing a Ph.D., Krens worked on an M.B.A. from Yale University, which was awarded in 1984. He embarked upon a career in major museum management, first consulting for the redesign of the Brooklyn [Art] Museum in 1984.

Krens developed the idea of using an abandoned factory in Massachusetts for a Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), funded by the state with private donations of cash and art to maintain it. The success of this project led to his appointment as consultant for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1986. Krens’ assignment was to revitalize the famous museum whose attendance and finances were dwindling in the face of the highly competitive New York art museum scene.

Two year later, Krens was appointed director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which oversaw The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, SoHo, succeeding Thomas Messer. Williams College renewed his adjunct professor status the same year, 1988, which he held until 1991. 1989 was an eventful year for Krens. Austrian art agencies asked him to participate on the creation of a collaborative museum project with the Guggenheim. Though the project never materialized, Krens used the idea of a satellite museum to develop what would be the hallmark of his tenure with the Museum: a branch Guggenheim system sponsored by corporations, as a way to increase the museum profile and revenues.

James Billington

James Hadley Billington is an American academic. He is the thirteenth Librarian of the United States Congress.

Born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Billington was educated in the public schools of the Philadelphia area. He was class valedictorian at both Lower Merion High School and Princeton University, where he graduated with highest honors in 1950. Three years later, he earned his doctorate from Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. Following service with the U.S. Army and in the Office of National Estimates, he taught history at Harvard University from 1957 to 1962 and subsequently at Princeton University, where he was a professor of history from 1964 to 1974.

From 1973 to 1987, Billington was director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the nation’s official memorial in Washington, D.C. to America’s 28th president. As director, he founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Center and seven other new programs as well as the Wilson Quarterly.

Billington was sworn in as the Librarian of Congress on September 14, 1987. He is the 13th person to hold the position since the Library of Congress was established in 1800.

Billington has championed the Library’s American Memory National Digital Library (NDL) Program, which makes freely available on-line over 8.5 million American historical items from the collections of the Library and other research institutions. These unique American Memory materials and the Library’s other Internet services, which include the congressional database, THOMAS, the on-line card catalog, exhibitions, information from the U.S. Copyright Office and a web site for children and families called America’s Library, handled more than 2.6 billion transactions last year.

Billington created the Library’s first national private-sector advisory group, the James Madison Council, whose members have supported the NDL Program, many other Library outreach programs, and acquisitions for the Library’s collections. In 2000, the Library’s bicentennial year, Madison Council Chairman John W. Kluge made the largest monetary donation in the Library’s history: US$60 million to create within the Library the John W. Kluge Center, a place for advanced scholars and a Nobel-level prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities or social sciences.

2001

Vassily Aksyonov

Born on August 20, 1932, in Kazan, U.S.S.R., Vassily Pavlovich Aksyonov has gained increasing recognition as a writer of satirical, surrealistic fiction.

Called the Russian J. D. Salinger by many critics for his treatment of youth, alienation, and the search for meaning, Aksyonov has been praised for the wide scope of his novels, his social satire, and his historical scholarship. His works continue to be translated into English, and currently Aksyonov is again being recognized as a prominent voice in literature.

Widely known for his association with the “youth prose” movement in Russian literature, Vassily Aksyonov has established himself as a satirist whose topics include political corruption, the Soviet regime, alienation, adolescent angst, and cultural differences between the East and West. His surrealistic techniques coupled with his use of jargon and slang are trademark characteristics of Aksyonov’s fiction. The blending of real historical events into his novels has also distinguished Aksyonov’s work. Novels such as Ozhog (1980; The Burn) and Ostrov Krym (1981; The Island of Crimea) address a variety of issues such as political imprisonment, exile, corruption, and isolation.

The surrealistic novel The Burn has many autobiographical elements and traces the development of five alternate versions of Tolya Von Steinbock’s persona. Divided into three section, The Burn focuses on three different periods in Tolya’s life. In The Island of Crimea, set on the Crimean peninsula, Aksyonov imagines that Crimea is an autonomous society separated from the Soviet Union. The novel is another social satire reliant on a stretch of the imagination, but it is deemed less surrealistic and far-fetched than Aksyonov’s previous works. Skazi izjum! (1985; Say Cheese!) presents an account of Aksyonov’s emigration to America and provides an insightful look into Soviet culture and regime. Pokolenie zimy (1993; Generations of Winter) is a sweeping epic that begins during the 1920s and ends with the conclusion of World War II. The novel has been compared to the works of Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Norton Townshend Dodge

Norton Townshend Dodge is a American economist who has amassed one of the largest collections of Soviet-era art outside the Soviet Union.

A Sovietologist who did pioneering work on the role of women under Joseph Stalin, Dodge smuggled into the West the works of dissident artists, painters and sculptors in the former Soviet Union. He continued to acquire art and meet clandestinely with artists, often at great personal risk, till the death of dissident artist Evgeny Rukhin and the coming of perestroika. He managed to smuggle nearly 10,000 works of art from the USSR to the United States during the height of the Cold War. Dodge’s role in the preservation and patronage of art disallowed by the government led to his being called “the Lorenzo de’ Medici of [[Russian art]Elena Kornetchuk in Mcphee 1994].” Dodge’s work is detailed at length in John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art (1994).

Dodge appears in an Andrei Zagdansky documentary Vasya (2002) about a Russian Nonconformist artist Vasily Sitnikov. The latest award-winning documentary about Norton Dodge and his unique art collection “The Russian Concept: Reflections on Russian Non-Conformist Art” was produced in 2009 by Igor Sopronenko.

The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconformist Art, which contains roughly 20,000 works of art, was donated to Rutgers University in the mid-1990s, where it is on permanent display at the University’s Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum.

Dodge is one of the founding board members of the Kolodzei Art Foundation, a US-based group dedicated to advancing the study of Russian non-conformist art.

2000

Mikhail Epshtein

Mikhail Naumovich Epshtein is an American literary theorist and critical thinker. He is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian Literature at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has authored 15 books and approximately 400 essays and articles, translated into 14 languages (in library catalogs they are listed under his Russian surname Epshtein).
His areas of specialization include postmodernism, cultural theory, Russian literature and intellectual history, contemporary philosophical and religious thought, ideas and electronic media, and interdisciplinary approaches in the humanities. Professor Epstein is also an expert on Russian philosophers of the 19th and 20th century as well as Soviet era philosophers like Nikolai Berdyaev.

Vagrich Bakhchanyan

Vagrich Bakhchanyan was an Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian and American painter, artist and writer-conceptualist (and/or conceptual poet and writer) in the Russian language.

He was born to an Armenian family in Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he grew up, studied and began painting. In the mid-1960s he moved to Moscow, where worked at Literaturnaya Gazeta. In 1974 Bakhchanyan emigrated to United States, and lived in New York, where he was active in the literary and art scene. There he collaborated with Russian and Soviet emigré writers Sergei Dovlatov, Alexander Genis, and Naum Sagalovsky, among others. He died on November 12, 2009 in New York City.

1999

Oleg Vassiliev

Oleg Vassiliev is a Russian painter associated with the Soviet Nonconformist Art style. Vassiliev emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York in 1990 and currently lives and works in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Vassiliev graduated from V.I. Surikov State Art Institute, Moscow, in 1958. In the late 1950s he became influenced by the Russian avant-garde formalists, Vladimir Favorsky (1886-1964), Robert Falk (1886-1958), and A.V. Fonvizin (1882-1973).

From the 1950s through the 1980s, Vassiliev worked with friend and collaborator Erik Bulatov as a children’s book illustrator. They developed a unique style of illustration that combined realist painting with graphic elements, such as text. This “official” source of income provided the means and materials for Vassiliev to take part in the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement, also known as “unofficial” or “dissident” art. Along with friends, Ilya Kabakov, Erik Bulatov and Victor Pivovarov, Vassiliev belonged to a large group of Soviet artists that took advantage of the Nikita Khrushchev “thaw” in official policy that opened up the Soviet Union to Western culture in the years following Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953.

During this period of time Vassiliev developed his mature style. In his art Vassiliev combines the traditions of Russian Realism of the 19th century with the Russian avant-garde of the beginning of the 20th century. “Vassiliev’s principal themes, which were born while he was in Russia and continue to the present day, are his memories of home and houses, roads, forests, fields, friends and family. Vassiliev always starts his creative process from a very personal memory, from his sacred space, the safeguarded inner center, and connects it with the visual image. Vassiliev masterfully incorporates elements from different times and spaces and arranges them throughout his paintings according to the logic and ‘energetic’ space of the painting.”