Peter Lyukimson, Moscow – Tel Aviv, Exclusively to Vestnik Kavkaza
By tradition, the Moscow International Book Fair opened in Moscow on September 3rd at VDNKh. At first, it was promised that 82 countries would participate in the festival, but later the number fell to 63, although in fact only 32 countries took part in the fair. The political context of this was obvious: many countries rejected participation in the book forum and many countries presented not leading, but secondary editions. Moreover, special attention was paid to the pavilions of Crimea and Donetsk. However, despite these facts, the book festival was great.
Russian publishing houses dominated at the fair, and looking at the thousands of books, one could say that rumors about the death of books were exaggerated. There is a crisis for publishing business, but it is not dead.
Russia and the world continue to publish books of all genres and directions – from serious psychological novels to light fiction, from popular science to academic monographs.
At the same time, one could say that a large portion of the books published in Russia is devoted to children and teenagers – fiction, textbooks, popular science. The level of printing and illustrations is amazing, as well as the variety of topics, original approaches to them, and so on. It seems that in the century of e-books children and teenagers are the main readers of traditional paper books, probably they won’t let them die in the future. The amount of business literature increased.
The Azerbaijani pavilion presented dozens of published books. “At the moment, about 150 publishing houses are working in Azerbaijan; they publish various literature in different languages,” Chingiz Alioglu, a well-known poet, told me at the fair. “I should note that the geography of the literary contacts of Azerbaijan has extended significantly in recent years; many countries are interested in our republic and our national literature. For example, recently a book of my poems was published in Finnish. It changes a lot. For example, even though the Russian-speaking book market is important for Azerbaijan, it cannot be called the biggest priority, as many Azerbaijani authors have an opportunity to publish their books not only in Russian, but also in Turkish, English and French. However, we are here, as contacts with Russia are very important for us.”
Unfortunately, there were almost no books devoted to the history and the current political problem of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict among those that were brought from Baku; even though the topic is very acute for Azerbaijan and unknown to many Russian citizens.
At the same time, similar criticism can be addressed to another country – Israel. A big delegation of writers came to the Moscow Fair; the Israeli pavilion presented novels, collections of funny stories, guide books, poems, and so on, but no books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Meanwhile, both countries – Israel and Azerbaijan – constantly complain that the international community doesn't treat them objectively and they are losing the information war. Of course there is a biased attitude in covering the Armenian-Azerbaijani and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts: many events are misinterpreted, facts are falsified – and both countries are fair in their complaints. But this is their fault as well, because they are not active enough in propaganda of their positions in the international arena. They don’t publish books on the acute topics and don’t use such forums as the Moscow Fair to explain their positions.
