Slavic Garden

In its pursuit of active intercultural dialogue between Slavic cultures with the aim to foster mutual understanding, respect and cooperation and exploration of new opportunities for popularisation, the FSK, in collaboration with a new partner – the Pula book fair, conceived and launched an extensive literary programme titled the Slavic Garden (Slavenski đardin) aimed at promoting Slavic literature. The programme is meant as a place, a garden, in which Slavic literature and culture grow and intertwine across discussions about contemporary identities, aesthetics and social relations.

The programme features:

“Slavic Garden was designed to grow into a traditional, permanent and important part of the Fair(y). The colloquial term for garden – đardin – points to the idiosyncrasies of the Istrian region which lives and breathes its multiethnicity within the Slavic circle.”
Magdalena Vodopija, director, Book Fair(y) in Istria


“We are glad and proud to be, together with our partners, here in a special place where different cultures meet, where the Slavic and Romance-speaking worlds meet, where new horizons open up, and where we opened the borders of our project and created a new program.”
Andreja Rihter, PhD, Director of the Forum of Slavic Cultures at the opening ceremony

PARTNERS

EVENTS

100 SLAVIC NOVELS AND FSK READING CORNER

The programme of Slavic Garden 2019 featured three prominent Russian writers, as well as translators, experts, publishers, academics and other literary guests. This programme section included a reading corner dedicated to the FSK flagship project 100 Slavic Novels, four round-table discussions featuring book presentations, a photography exhibition by Slovenian photographer Jože Suhadolnik.

ROUND-TABLE DISCUSSIONS AND BOOK PRESENTATIONS

Well-attended sessions featured Russian authors Guzel Yakhina, Sergei Lebedev and Yevgeny Vodolazkin side by side with their Croatian translators and publishers. The moderator was Ivana Peruško Vindakijevič, Head of the Department of East Slavic Languages and Literatures at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb, who also took part in designing the programme. The evening panel discussion Forgiveness and/or the Past featured Guzel Yakhina, Slovenian-Austrian writer and this year’s recipient of the Austrian Art Prize Maja Haderlap.

PHOTO EXHIBITION

Programme presentation and agreement signing

ABOUT THE BOOK FAIR(Y) IN ISTRIA

Book Fair(y) in Istria, the Pula book fair is the most prominent event of its kind in Croatia and one of the most important ones in the region. It was created in 1995 from the bold gesture of one man to call a small exhibition of books, organized shortly after the end of the war, the 1st Book Fair in Istria. At its core lies the spirit of the sixties and seventies, the memory of the growth of a new city, urban and creative, marked by the creative power of the people of Pula at the time, their courage to change the world from a geographical margin.

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