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2.10 - The Market

from History 2 - Mechanisms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 December 2024

By
Bradley A. Gorski
Edited by
Simon Franklin ,
Rebecca Reich  and
Emma Widdis
Simon Franklin
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Rebecca Reich
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Emma Widdis
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

A capitalist market has been part of modern Russian literature since at least the early nineteenth century. Even during the Soviet era, the market was never entirely abolished. But when socialism fell in 1991, capitalism rushed in. This chapter focuses on the economic, social, and aesthetic consequences of the market in post-Soviet Russian literature. The book market boomed just as thick journals and legacy critics lost cultural authority, and as readers, publishers, and writers were pulled towards bestselling imports, largely western pulp. Drawn by success and fascinated by new forms, many authors innovated genre conventions, authorial performance, and audience interaction, using misdirection, mystification, and online and social media, among other strategies. Others mobilised the terms of capitalism to mount a critique of the illusory values of the new market society.

Keywords

capitalismpost-Sovietmarketbestsellerinternetcritiqueauthorship
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature , pp. 388 - 406
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Barker, Adele Marie (ed.), Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex and Society since Gorbachev (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Borenstein, Eliot, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).Google Scholar
Brooks, Jeffrey, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Dwyer, Jeremy, ‘The Knizhnoe obozrenie bestseller lists, Russian reading habits, and the development of Russian literary culture, 1994–98’, Russian Review 66.2 (2007), 295–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gorski, Bradley A., Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2025).Google Scholar
Goscilo, Helena, ‘Big-buck books: Pulp fiction in post-Soviet Russia’, Harriman Review 2.2–3 (1999), 6–24.Google Scholar
Lovell, Stephen, Russia’s Reading Revolution: Print Culture in the Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras (London: Routledge, 1999).Google Scholar
Menzel, Birgit, and Lovell, Stephen (eds.), Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective (Munich: Verlag Otto Sagner, 2005).Google Scholar
Olcott, Anthony, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Way of Crime (Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield, 2001).Google Scholar

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