The festival of Short New Prose "Unscripted Readings" will celebrate its tenth anniversary in the CCA Winzavod with a two-day reading marathon.
One of the key Russian thematic festivals is changing its registration this year and moving from the Hermitage Garden Park to the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art.
On July 11-12, on the main stage of the Winzavod, as well as in other spaces of this art cluster, leading Russian actors will read texts together with the winners of the competition, which has been running since August 2025 throughout the country.
"Ten years is already a serious date even for a child, especially for a festival. At this age, children and festivals often open a new page in their lives, caused by growing up and expanding horizons. The winery is in many ways a cult institution, and we will be happy to create together with it a new format for introducing viewers to Russian short prose. We plan to significantly expand the range of events at our festival, as the possibilities at the Winery are disproportionately greater due to a completely different infrastructure. It also seems to us that connecting the audiences of our festival and the Winery will give a unique synergetic effect," Anastasia Prits, producer of the festival and the literary and theatrical project "Unprincipled Readings".
"Of course, the festivals in the Hermitage Garden and at the Winzavod will be different, there is the charm of the closeness of a beautiful park, at the Winzavod there is the scope and nerve of the avant-garde of modern art in historical decorations. Our festival is ten years old - as a good aging for wine, which appeared on the Russian landscape not so long ago. You will read about all the innovations in the news, but I am especially glad that this year we will read not only short stories, but also posts from social networks, which have become an independent subgenre of prose," Alexander Tsypkin, writer, playwright, co–producer of the festival and the literary and theatrical project "Free Readings".
CCA Winzavod has been supporting relevant Russian art for 20 years. By joining forces, the Free Readings literary and theatrical project and the Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art are opening up new opportunities to find and support young talents, as well as to further popularize modern literature and art. This collaboration will be an important step towards expanding the young audience, developing cultural dialogue and creating new forms of interaction between authors, artists and viewers. This year, 1,760 applications have already been submitted for participation in the festival, and their number continues to grow.
Program details and rules of participation.
July 11, 2026 14.00 – Round table 12+
The topic of discussion will be announced closer to the date of the event (participation is free upon pre-registration, which will open in June 2026). 19.00 – Gala concert "Unprincipled readings", 18+ Headliners: Alexander Gutin, Alexander Tsypkin, Alexander Malenkov, Alexandra Child, Katerina Shpitsa. *
July 12, 2026 13.00 – "Unsupervised readings" for the whole family, 6+ Headliners: Karina Kagramanyan, Yaroslav Matveev, Alexandra Deten, Alisa Rudenko, Alexander Tsypkin and others*
19.00 – Gala concert "Unprincipled readings", 18+ Headliners: Anton Kostochkin, Maxim Matveev, Alexander Tsypkin, Konstantin Khabensky, Dmitry Chebotarev. *
The festival hosts a competition of authors and readers aged from 6 years. All details and application rules are available in a special section on the project's website. www.besprintsypno.ru The deadline for submitting applications is May 25, 2026. The results of this year's selection will be published on June 10 on the project's website, on the social networks of Alexander Tsypkin and the Free Readings project.
For the first time, the Short New Prose Festival "Unprincipled Readings" was held in 2016. The festival has not interrupted its history for ten years. During the pandemic, it was held online, garnering more than 2 million views across Russia. In 10 years, the project has attracted more than 800,000 viewers, discovered more than 100 new authors of modern prose, and released 7 collections. Following the results of the festival, the project, together with the AST Publishing House, releases a limited edition collection of the best works by all participating authors. The Free Readings Festival has a wide geography. The project has already visited St. Petersburg, Barnaul, Krasnodar, Vladivostok, Perm, Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod and dozens of other cities. The project itself has already toured in 15 countries around the world.
*The full list of participants of the festival may change and will be published on the website and social networks of Alexander Tsypkin and the literary project "Free Readings".
July 11-12, 2026 CSI Vinzavod, Moscow, 4th Syromyatnicheskiy lane, 1/8, building
www.besprintsypno.ru
"Unsupervised readings" on social media
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The Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art has been a leading institution for the support and development of art for the past 19 years. Galleries, artists' workshops, exhibition spaces in historical halls, an expert community and large–scale projects to support art - all this is CCA Vinzavod.