A literary tour by tram around the city took place for the second time in Ulyanovsk as part of the program “Ulyanovsk - UNESCO City of Literature” on August 18. About a hundred citizens took part in the tour.

For the second year in a row, the directorate of the program "Ulyanovsk - UNESCO City of Literature" together with the Department of Culture of the city and "Ulyanovskeletrotrans" initiate a literary tour on trams around the evening city. The idea of ​​the project is to travel around the city together and listen to readers who read aloud excerpts from the works of authors from other literary cities of the world.

“It is very important for us to keep in touch with the cities of literature around the world, but we also want to keep this connection between the cities and the inhabitants of our city,” says Pasha Andreev, program manager

This tour includes selections from UNESCO Cities of Literature from Australia, Spain, the Czech Republic, New Zealand, Scotland, the UK and Estonia.

This year, the project participants gathered at the northern tram depot from where the journey began.

The first excerpt from the novel "Shantaram" by the Australian writer Gregory David Roberts from Melbourne was read out to the audience by Vadim Andreev, deputy head of the city administration of Ulyanovsk.

Then all the participants and readers boarded the tram and set off on their journey.

Two Ulyanovskelectrotrans trams passed through the streets of Radishchev, Spasskaya, Zheleznaya Division, Kirov, Lokomotivnaya, Inzenskaya and Gaya Avenue, and then returned to the northern tram depot.

One of the readers was Oksana Solntseva, Minister of Youth Development of the Ulyanovsk Region, who read an excerpt from the story “Spring” by the Estonian writer Oskar Luts from Tartu near the gazebo near the Museum of Photography.

“We talk a lot about the fact that it is possible to involve smart self-sufficient youth in any socially significant action only with the help of unique content. In my opinion, LiteraTour is the very case! Clever, interesting, organic, atmospheric, and this makes it very attractive! I think that the event has only one drawback - you can visit it only once a year,” Oksana Solntseva shared her impression.

The invited guest of the tour was the Ulyanovsk writer, playwright Gala Uzryutova, who read excerpts from her stories and poetry at the final stop of the route in the center of the tram ring on Gaya Avenue.

“A literary tour on a tram is an opportunity to look at Ulyanovsk in a new way, to perceive the city as a text. When you ride a tram and someone reads a passage from the text, the picture outside the window ceases to be familiar and becomes an unexpected illustration to the story. And such textual topography creates a new Ulyanovsk inside. It also looks like textual shamanism - get out of two trams together with everyone, get up at night on the tram ring and read stories, poems. And read not only to each other, but also to the city, which, of course, is a living organism, and listens to what we say to it, ”Gala shared her opinion

List of works of the literary tour in 2017:

Janet Frame Winter Garden (Dunedin, New Zealand)

Robert Louis Stevenson "Kidnapped, or The Adventures of David Balfour" (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Federico Garcia Lorca “Blood Wedding” (Granada, Spain)

Gregory David Roberts “Shantaram” (Melbourne, Australia)

Jan Nepomuk Neruda “Eclogue of the Primordial Forest” (Prague, Czech Republic)

Oskar Luts “Spring” (Tartu, Estonia)

Philip Pullman “Golden Compass” (Norwich, UK)

Gala Uzryutova (Ulyanovsk, Russia)

Also, the works of the tour were read aloud by journalist and photographer Victoria Chrenysheva, PR manager Marina Matveeva, marketer Ksenia Tilkanova, head of the Kvartal creative space Dmitry Shatskov and actors Sergey Karachev and Anna Andreyonok.

“I spent the evening in a very pleasant company - in the Literary tram. I was pleased with active young people I knew, and stylish handsome drivers (they are also “ace pilots”), and people reading works. Even the fact that I walked with the confidence that I would hear poetry, but heard prose, did not spoil my evening at all. Everything was pleasant. I look forward to new experiments,” one of the participants in the project, Milana Mishina, shared her impressions at the end of the evening.

The next round will take place in 2018.