Last Friday in Moscow the winner of one of the country’s leading book prizes, the National Bestseller Prize, was announced in “a lavish ceremony in St. Petersburg’s Astoria Hotel.” Mikhail Shishkin‘s novel, Maidenhair won the prize known as “the least literary and the most oriented toward popular tastes.” But as Victor Sonkin reports in a Moscow Times story, what really sets apart the “Natsbest” “is the ceremony itself”: “The National Bestseller jury reaches its decision in public. Each member casts his or her vote, and the result becomes known when one nominee has earned more votes than the rest. This year, the first three speakers each favored different books.” The first three judges — a designer, an editor and a deacon — all voted for different books, but “Television personality Svetlana Konegen and theater director Kirill Serebrennikov sealed the prize’s fate by giving their votes to Shishkin. This meant that the vote of the last jury member, the secretive writer Viktor Pelevin — who of course failed to appear in person — didn’t really matter. Yet Pelevin still managed to deliver some entertainment value. In a letter, he described his arduous efforts to divine the winner through a Chinese ritual that ultimately yielded Shishkin’s name.”