The Russian Booker prize, which has been awarded annually to the best novel since 1992, is the country's oldest book prize. Despite new rivals like the National Bestseller and, the state-sponsored Big Book, whose cash equivalent is more than five times bigger than Booker's $20,000, the prize is still valued as an important measure of the nation's best prose.

Still, for all these 15 years, the prize's juries have focused on a particular segment of literature, primarily published by ‘thick' literary magazines, like Novy Mir or Oktyabr, and a few associated publishers. Books that the prize has favored could be loosely described as traditional realistic prose, and experimental works or those breaking taboos have mostly been ignored.

Also, with the demise of the ‘thick' literary magazines and older literary establishment in recent years, the prize's shortlists have often included books and authors no one has ever heard of outside literary circles, at the same time ignoring authors enjoying critical and commercial success. As a result, these days, the Russian Booker prize looks too much like a hybrid of a ghetto and a clique of insiders who distribute the prize amongst themselves.

There is nothing much wrong with that, except that booksellers and publishers have finally realized the potential of a book's short listing for its future sales and begun to use that as a promotion tool. And it can be annoying when someone picks up a book at a store labelled "Booker shortlist" and finds under its cover something similar to what an average literary magazine would run 15 years ago.

This year's shortlist is no exception. Established and popular authors, like Vladimir Sorokin, Viktor Pelevin and Dmitry Bykov, were left out, and the only high profile book on the shortlist was Lyudmila Petru­shevskaya's Daniel Stein, the Translator. The names of the other short-listed books' authors, Andrei Dmitriyev, Alexander Ilyichev­sky, Igor Sakhnov­sky, Yuri Maletski and Alex Tarn, mean little to most Russian readers, although some of them are established writers in The Booker Prize's circles.

While singling out authors unknown to the general public is a common feature of just about every Booker Prize, members of this year's jury have admitted one thing that is different from the prize's policies of previous years - they have started to look at genre literature as well, which used to be a taboo.

On the new shortlist, a novel by Israel-based Russian immigrant Alex Tarn, which deals with a super-agent saving the world from international terrorists, represents genre literature. However, the question arises as to why that particular novel was chosen, and how is it different from dozens or, probably, hundreds of other titles published each year and pigeonholed as ‘mass market fiction.'

It looks like the prize is at a crossroads and not really sure which way to go. It is unwilling to reject its traditional inclinations and look at a full spectrum of contemporary domestic prose - regardless of "quality" or "mass-market." But organizers must understand that it is time to make changes. Otherwise, the prize could easily turn into something ridiculous, and other, newer, book prizes could make that unavoidable.

Still, shifting focus to mass-market fiction doesn't look as a wise decision, as this would require an altogether different set of criteria.

By Vladimir Kozlov