On 12 June 2000 in St. George's Hall in the Kremlin, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, president of the Russian Federation, presented the State Prize in literature to Vladimir Makanin. For Makanin's longtime readers who managed to catch a glimpse of the ceremony on television, the moment was a joyful, if improbable, one in the history of contemporary Russian literature, undiminished by the irony in the lateness of the official recognition. Makanin's career as a writer began with his well-received first novel, Priamaia liniia (1967; translated as The Straight Line, 1967). As the period known as the Thaw, initiated by Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, which had permitted such success, came to a close, however, he endured some twenty years on the margins of Russian literature, only to be "rediscovered" in the late 1980s. The moment in the Kremlin in the summer of 2000 thus completed a circle for Makanin--from his initial bright promise to the exclusion...