The Rise and Fall of the Book Market in Post-Soviet Russia
Bradley Gorski (Georgetown)
Topic: Capitalist markets rushed into book publishing even before the Soviet Union fell, when market-based reasoning of supply and demand and return on investment influenced publishing decisions starting in the late 1980s. The market promised to liberate literature from Soviet ideological strictures and to bring Russian literature into modern world culture. But by the second post-Soviet decade, Russian literature’s exuberant hopes for the market era had soured. This talk traces the arc of post-Soviet literature by showing how capitalism changed literature and even laid the groundwork for a revived authoritarian culture.