It’s Vladimir Putin’s 57th birthday today! The patriarch called to congratulate the prime minister, as did Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, affectionately known as “Europe’s last dictator.” Even dissidents marked the occasion. Nezavisimaya Gazeta published a mocking ode (“I love you so tenderly and so sincerely.") wishing the prime minister would trade up titles, from “prime minister” to “God.”

But some people insisted on being party-poopers. Some people – some writers – decided they were going to insult Putin on his birthday and not come to a discussion of writers at Putin’s dacha. according to the PM’s press secretary, “a free conversation touching upon issues like the role of literature in life, and the publishing business” – out of “principle.”

“Because, if we go, we’re not going to talk about anything important; we’ll have to congratulate the birthday boy and eat cake,” chief scribbling snubber Dmitrii Bykov told Gazeta.ru. ( Bykov is author of a ground-breaking biography of Boris Pasternak and books like “How Putin Became President of the USA.”)

Others abstaining from cake-and-candles chez Putin include Eduard Limonov, a writer and leader of a socialist-nationalist party of prank-pullers (Keith Gessen once called him “a fascist writer”) and the literary queen bee herself, Ludmila Ulitskaya, often published in The New Yorker and a contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize.

At the Kremlin, however, flack and event organizers were unaware of this protest, nor had it invited these writers.