With official Anglo-Russian relations now stuck in the deep freeze - and at a Cold War setting - thanks to the Litvinenko affair, what better moment to remember and revive the much warmer story of our literary links? Mainstream fiction and drama in Britain both owe so much to the eruption into literary life a century ago of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekhov and Dostoyevsky that the debt passes all calculation. Soviet-era titans such as Mandelstam, Tsvetayeva and Brodsky stretched the Russian grip on many native minds from prose to verse. And still fresh revelations come. Yesterday saw the second award of the biennial Rossica Prize for the translation of Russian literature into English - a contest free of any limits as to form or period, which means that the shortlist this time could boast Anthony Briggs's new version of War and Peace. That, by any measure, is heavyweight competition.
Yet Tolstoy failed to win. The Rossica Prize went to Joanne Turnbull's translation of the rediscovered tales of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, 7 Stories (GLAS/New Russian Writing, £8.99). On publication, Lesley Chamberlain's review in The Independent applauded these mind-bendingly surreal satires as fragments from a «Soviet Alice in Wonderland». Krzhizhanovsky's stories draw a sinister landscape of malign objects and baffling forces in which lost and hapless individuals blunder through their blackly comic nightmares. Things - from the Eiffel Tower to a pianist's own hand - turn nasty, run amok and take revenge.
Kiev-born, of Polish Catholic descent, he was one of those doomed literary innovators of the Soviet 1920s and 1930s who ran into a brick wall of suspicion, indifference and outright hostility - a brick wall topped, inevitably, by Comrade Stalin's impassable moustache. Krzhizhanovsky made his own lonely way through literature, but he did find help from afar. Reading Shakespeare, «suddenly I felt that I had a friend who could protect me from the metaphysical delusion».
And the metaphysical delusion, in its Stalinist guise, was then casting its fatal spell on Russian culture. Unlike so many other writers of the time, Krzhizhanovsky did not actually disappear into the Gulag. Instead, frustration and rejection pushed him into poverty and alcoholism. He died forgotten, or never-known, in 1950, his unwanted fables of a world turned so bizarrely topsy-turvey lodged in the state archives where they would come to light, a quarter of a century later.
Thankfully, not every worthwhile Russian writer has to languish in disgrace and obscurity. Under the pseudonym of «Boris Akunin», Grigory Chkhartishvili has within a decade sold around 20 million copies of his seductive historical mysteries. In addition to his dapper Tsarist-era detective Erast Fandorin, he has launched, with his «Sister Pelagia» series, a second sleuth: a modest, myopic but invincibly bright and curious nun, Miss Marple to Fandorin's Russian Holmes. In Pelagia and the Black Monk (translated by Andrew Bromfield; Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £12.99), the sister dons a secular disguise to sort out a seemingly haunted island monastery where superstition and psychiatry uneasily collide.
For all his status as a globe-circling bestseller, Akunin keeps faith in his sleekly engineered and allusive whodunnits with the classical virtues of Russian prose. Gory and shocking events arrive in immaculate literary dress. That polish lends his books a peculiar charm for English-speaking readers raised on a diet of older translations from the Russian masters. In his novella The Decorator (from the recent Fandorin volume Special Assignments), Akunin even imagines the possibility of a Russian Jack the Ripper leaving a fatal trail through the foggy streets of London in 1888. Though not with polonium, of course.