 He was awarded the Anti-Booker Prize and accepted an invitation to the Rotterdam Poetry Festival.His suicide, seen by many skeptics as a desperate plea for recognition and fame (the kind of which has been popular in Russia since Sergei Esenin's suicide in a St. Petersburg hotel in 1925), was a sad consequence of his manic depression and substance abuse.Shortly afterwards, he was posthumously awarded the Northern Palmyra, one of the mostly highly sought after prizes in Russian letters, for his collection "Opravdaniye zhizni" ("A Reason to Live").