Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia

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. "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.