We rode your sun

The poet in Russia is more than a poet. This fleeting phrase by Yevgeny Yevtushenko is repeated by anyone who can’t be bothered when the conversation turns to poetry. For some reason, people don’t say this about fantasists. It’s unfair. The fantasist in Russia is more than a fantasist. Sometimes he is even bigger than the very fantasy itself. Not everyone, of course. The circle of such writers is small. Ivan Efremov, the Strugatsky brothers, Vladislav Krapivin, Kir Bulychov, Boris Shtern, Mikhail Uspensky… To this rare minority rightfully belongs Yevgeny Lukin. For him, fantasy is an instrument like Leskov's microcoscope: you look into its eyepiece and see that beside the flea on the tray lies a little key as well. Reading the writer Lukin is a joy and a pleasure. The joy comes from the quality of his prose, and the pleasure comes from the jester's atmosphere in which his characters reside. You read him and suddenly see how Gogol winks at you in a sly way from the page, how Saltykov-Shchedrin twists his finger at his temple, or how the tail of the cat Behemoth flicks somewhere between the chapters.
If you start counting all the awards and prizes Lukin has received since the beginning of his writing career, you’d already lose track somewhere in the fifth or sixth dozen. He has over a hundred of them. "Aelita", "Strannik", "Bronze Snail", "ABS Prize", Interpresscon, Roscon, named after Ivan Efremov, the Belyaev Prize, "Golden Ostap" and numerous other diverse ones. Even the "Literary Gazette" once declared him a laureate of the "Golden Calf" prize for his ironic poems. And in 2015, Lukin was awarded the honorary title of Grandmaster of European Fantasy.