The 2022 literary festival for families, The Power of Words, was hosted by Bashkortostan’s Blagoveshchensk and Nizhnekamsk. In the course of the two-day event, popular writers Aleksey Salnikov, Andrey Usachev, Denis Dragunsky and others offered a series of meet-the-star meetings with the residents and left hundreds of autographs in their books that were on sale at the festival’s book fair that featured some of Russia’s leading publishing houses including AST, Samokat, Alpina Publisher, Career Press and CompassGid.

Several other prominent literary figures also took part in the festival. Leonid Klein, a journalist, radio host, and the author of the bestselling Useless Classics, used some really striking and vivid examples to show middle- and high-school students the true benefits of reading literature. Ufa’s TV presenter, journalist and cinematographer Sergei Barkhatov gripped his listeners with exciting lectures on the writings by Dostoevsky, Bulgakov and by famous 20th century female fairy tale writers. Teachers of the Russian language and literature from Blagoveshchensk’s schools visited the festival’s teaching laboratory organized and led by Rimma Rapport, a teacher of the Russian language and literature from St. Petersburg and a regular contributor to Mel (Chaulk), an online publication, Anton Skulachev, chairman of the Writers’ Guild, a teacher of the Russian language and literature at Moscow’s School 1514, and the editor-in-chief of SberClass literature platform, and by Ksenia Belkevich, deputy director of Vladimir Dahl State Museum of the History of Russian Literature, founder of the Weekend Fairy Tale studio, a teacher and a developer of programs for children. They introduced their audience of fellow teachers to novel approaches in education and shared their most relevant and up-to-date pedagogical practices. A total of more than thirty different events took place as part of The Power of Words festival including master classes put on by book publishing houses, drama master classes, the All-Russian Total Dictation campaign, a poetry battle and a reciting contest. The festival culminated in an on-stage performance of Elena Isayeva's play titled About My Mother and Me, presented by the creative tandem of two actresses: Polina Raikina (Sovremennik Theatre) and Dina Rakhimova (Stanislavsky Electric Theatre).