A new guide to Russian popular literature.

[Stefan Baumgarth]

Lovell, Stephen; Menzel, Birgit (eds.): Reading for Entertainment in 
Contemporary Russia. Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical 
Perspective. München, Verlag Otto Sagner, 2005. ISBN 3-87690-912-0. 
Paperback, 202 pp. (= Arbeiten und Texte zur Slavistik, Volume 78)

This volume brings together scholars from Britain, Germany and Russia to 
investigate the unprecedented boom in commercial popular literature that 
has occurred in post-Soviet Russia. From the early 1990s onwards, 
Russian readers began to rediscover genres of mass fiction that in 
Soviet times had been either taboo or under a dark cloud. Book 
publishing became a true 'business', and all genres of literature were 
fair game for the emerging literary entrepreneurs. Western thrillers and 
romantic novels were widely translated, but 'native' authors were soon 
trying their hand at these new forms - some of them with great 
commercial success. Russia was assimilating foreign cultural models with 
extraordinary rapidity, but at the same time giving them a new and 
distinctive flavour. The guide "Reading for Entertainment in 
Contemporary Russia" is the first full attempt to describe and analyse 
this remarkable three-way encounter between Russian and Soviet cultural 
traditions, Western genre patterns, and post-Soviet social and economic 
realities. It offers rich material for scholars and students in literary 
and cultural studies as well as for all readers with an interest in 
contemporary Russian culture and society.


Best regards!
Stefan Baumgarth

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