Contemporary Russian Literature

Vanya Bagaev's Vast Guide to Probably the World's Greatest Literary Culture

Dear Republic,

It’s the dog days of August and how better to celebrate that than with Madness Week — pieces that are unclassifiable, atypical, or in some cases dealing straight-up with madness.

It’s a privilege to introduce the week with Vanya Bagaev (and Konstantin Asimonov’s) insanely great guide to contemporary Russian literature, representing some unimaginable amount of work. Let this be an invitation to anyone else who’s willing to walk in Vanya’s enormous shoes and to do a similar presentation of the latest-and-greatest from any literary culture.

-ROL

CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN LITERATURE: PROPHECIES, MEMORY, MAGIC, EXPERIMENTS, AND EXILE

§0 Russian literature has always functioned as society's mirror and record of social upheaval but over the years of practice it has evolved further, into a seismograph. Writers now aren't just documenting what is happening but predicting what will happen, often with eerie accuracy, partly because nothing ever changes in Russia and everything always repeats itself, or as a famous joke goes, “in Russia, everything changes in 20 years, and nothing changes in 200 years,” however Russianly fatalistic and ironic that might sound. After the shift from the chaos, freedom, and unpredictability in the 1990s back to the ever-haunting authoritarianism in the 2000s, Russian literature found itself in a peculiar position where art imitates life and life imitates art: dystopias of most grotesque forms become political reality whilst historical novels serve as warnings about that very ouroborussian cycle and reminders of the perennial relevance of the Two Eternal Russian Questions: “Who's to blame? What's to be done?”

Yet another rupture, yet another societal fracture, yet another exodus of intelligentsia and dissidents came after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The scale of this wave was unprecedented: between half a million and a million people left the country, amongst them the majority of significant cultural and literary figures. New laws criminalising “discrediting the army” and spreading “fakes about military actions” effectively outlawed any anti-war position, including calls for peace, threatening up to fifteen years' imprisonment for words. Many writers found themselves on “foreign agent” lists, their books vanished from shelves or were sold wrapped in black paper, and in May 2025 raids on leading publishers ended with their directors’ arrests. With censorship came the return of samizdat (lit. “published by yourself”) and tamizdat (lit. “published out there”), now with the digital and internet capabilities. Russian literature, in its characteristic fashion, has once again gone abroad, to Riga, Berlin, London, Tbilisi, and other cities around the world that have become centres of Russian literature and culture overall.

“Despite” — or perhaps “because of” — all these and preceding crises writers have developed a particular literary language that for presentation purposes of this article I’d roughly divide into several key directions, dimensions, axes: prophetic visions of the future, represented by dystopias that anticipated Russian society's isolationism and militarisation; archaeology of historical memory, exposing the cyclical nature of national traumas; formal experiments that showed Russian prose is as innovative as ever; and “new realism” blended with magical realism that created space and new methods for comprehending the new reality.

These dimensions, their blends, and sociopolitical context are what I'll attempt to survey in this article. It's only a brief tour of what might be called (some of) the greatest hits of contemporary Russian literature from my personal perspective, including literateurs of all generations, with one exception — focusing on what's available in translation today. At the end of the article, I'll provide an additional list by my friend Konstantin featuring books that demand future translation. What we're sharing is by all means not a complete survey but only a slice, a tip of the iceberg for you to explore. It’s meant as an introduction; a whole book would be needed to cover it all.

I didn't want to make it as a list yet failed desperately. But trust me, it's not a list, it's a collection of mini essays, mini book reviews framed into an arbitrary taxonomy:

§1 Futurism and dystopia seem to me the most striking direction in contemporary Russian prose. These themes have become the most popular and influential, as it seems, for both writers and readers, often proving frighteningly prophetic, as if history follows the course of literature and not the other way around. Remarkably, this direction isn't limited to mass-market and genre literature but appears in “high” and experimental segments as well. Although really, as you'll see, no one cares about this dichotomy in the Russian literary scene.

§1.1 Vladimir Sorokin, a writer and an artist, began his creative journey in Moscow's conceptualist underground of the 1980s and has now transformed into a "national prophet" whose grotesque fantasies materialise with troubling regularity. Sorokin's plays and librettos have been staged at major theatres, his novels are translated into 20+ languages, with Western critics often comparing him to Orwell, Burgess, Kafka, and Pynchon at the same time. In Russia, Sorokin's celebrity status is paradoxical, for he's both a counterculture icon and, by now, almost a literary establishment. While he’s not a media person, Sorokin's name is widely recognised and sparks debate, and he’s often considered a dissident sage openly speaking against the 2022 war and the political trajectory in general since his first book The Norm, written in the early 1980s and now a cult classic.

His novel Day of the Oprichnik (2006) depicts 2028 in Russia when the country returns to monarchy and walls itself off from the world by the Great Russian Wall. At publication, critics took the book as vicious satire pushed to absurdity, and nobody, it seemed, wanted to take it seriously. Yet a decade and a half later, many of the novel's details — from isolationism and the quasi-religious rhetoric of power to the revival of barbaric forms of state violence — acquired sinister relevance. Sometimes it even seems the authorities have been using the book as a manual, it really does. The novel is also quite short and could serve as a good entry point to Sorokin's oeuvre in general. The story follows one day in the life of the senior oprichnik (personal police of Ivan IV The Formidable, the first Tsar of Russia) and from the inside shows the entire new-old system re-created in the country. Sorokin, known for being a master stylist able to produce any kind of prose from Tolstoy to bureaucratese, weaves archaisms with futuristic details, creating a world where, for example, a “Tsar's man” drives a Mercedes with a severed dog's head on the bumper, something that surely can happen given the schizophrenic nature of Russian regimes.

However, Sorokin's novel that I reckon might be most relevant for international readers is Telluria (2013). There's a thread in contemporary sociopolitical discourse about neo-feudalism, neo-tribalism, decentralisation, micro-states, etc., that some see as the world's future, and in Telluria Sorokin imagines exactly that version of it using Russia as a microcosm. The new Russian empire of the future collapses into feudal anarchy and Eurasia becomes, if I may, “balkanised.” Unlike other works, including Day of the Oprichnik that started this dystopian universe, Telluria's world isn't dystopian per se but rather presents us with a unique “neo-medieval utopia,” a geopolitical dystopia given modern standards, but comprised of microutopias, a world of pluralistic happiness where each individual finds personal joy. At the centre of this world is the Republic of Telluria, production site of the metaphysical substance tellurium, a non-addictive material that, when hammered into a person as a nail, enables rapid enlightenment and fulfills “conscious, deep, and outward-directed dreams,” essentially replacing traditional religion as people seek from it what they once sought from divinity: victory over time, reunion with the dead, and resurrection — “the third psychedelic revolution.” The narrative structure consists of fifty stylistically heterogeneous chapters of varying lengths, each presenting authentic stories and characters that rarely intersect or appear in other chapters, anything from conventional narratives to impersonal dialogues, plays, chapters written in “Centaur language,” stream-of-consciousness pieces without punctuation, manifestos, and even a three-page prayer. Even though it's a blend of science fiction, historical allusions, and satire, the book is first and foremost a dark mirror of contemporary Russia, based on one popular prophecy about its inevitable collapse.

§1.2 Dmitry Glukhovsky represents another pole of dystopian literature, more mainstream and accessible but no less prophetic. His Metro 2033 (2005), which began as an internet project, became a global phenomenon with print runs exceeding two million copies, translations into thirty-seven languages, and a popular video game franchise, making Glukhovsky a genuine “rock star.” In the novel(s), post-apocalyptic Moscow, where nuclear war survivors inhabit metro tunnels, became a metaphor for society driven underground and divided into warring station-states.

His later, most “prophetic” work, the novel Outpost (2019), combines both fantasy and political prophecy genres (if the latter can be considered as one). Initially it was released in the format of a ten-episode audio series voiced by the author himself. In Outpost, Glukhovsky, like Sorokin, depicted Russia after the civil war, collapsed and fragmented, with only Muscovy remaining from the empire, also walled off from the rest of the world. The novel became a satire on religious manipulation, historical amnesia, and the inevitability of empires’ collapse — themes that gained even greater relevance after 2022, questions that readers often ask him during interviews.

Both Sorokin and Glukhovsky became victims of the state's repressive machine: Sorokin was first persecuted back in 2002 for the novel Blue Lard, and later after 2022 his books were restricted for sales and the latest novel Legacy was banned altogether; Glukhovsky in 2022 was declared a foreign agent and sentenced in absentia to eight years’ prison for “spreading fakes about the Russian army,” yet from forced emigration, he continues not only writing but also active journalism, regularly appearing in international media. Despite being of different generations and having different upbringings, their transformation from creators of entertaining and grotesque worlds into uncompromising critics of the regime symbolises the journey of many Russian writers — archetypal even — for whom literature became not just a form of understanding reality but a form of political statement.

§1.3 Other examples of futurism and dystopian fiction:

• Tatyana Tolstaya’s The Slynx (2000) is a highly inventive novel written in an experimental language mixing archaisms with neologisms about post-apocalyptic Moscow where mutated descendants try to recreate civilization whilst forgetting its essence. The protagonist is a scribe who copies old Russian classics that the dictator claims as his own work.

• Viktor Pelevin is a cultural icon who really deserves a separate article or a few, for he's a genre in himself, even though, in my opinion, his best works were written in the '90s. He's been publishing almost one book per year, and some say their quality hasn’t been very consistent, plus he hasn’t been as politically active as others, so his relevancy has been decreasing. Nevertheless, contemporary Russian literature without Pelevin is unimaginable.

§2 Historical memory and trauma is the second crucial dimension. Unlike the futuristic/dystopian dimension, this one doesn't aim to predict the future but to resurface and revise the past, often forgotten, repressed, or rewritten, to show how it continues haunting us in the present and to warn of its repetition. As Svetlana Alexievich, the contemporary Belarusian author writing in Russian, noted in her 2015 Nobel speech, Russia has become “a country without memory, a space of total amnesia” — it's precisely this amnesia that many Russian writers dissect and perhaps cure.

§2.1 Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s prose is probably the opposite of Sorokin in many ways. Instead of grotesque, absurd, ultimately postmodern, her work is deeply humanistic and rooted in the tradition of psychological realism that should appear less exotic to those who love Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Ulitskaya writes historical novels where real events and experiences are shown through the lives of ordinary people and both personal and cultural memory. Her path to literature began with personal catastrophe, archetypal for a great Russian author: in 1970, the young geneticist was sacked from a research institute for distributing samizdat. The influence of this biographical fact can be seen in her work’s main themes: the individual's confrontation with the repressive system, preserving humanity in inhuman circumstances.

Daniel Stein, Interpreter (2006) explores Ulitskaya's own Jewish heritage and themes of otherness, marginality, and tolerance through the story of a Polish Jew who saved lives during the Holocaust and later became a Catholic priest. Born to a Jewish family herself, Ulitskaya uses this novel to examine questions of faith, identity, and the possibility of reconciliation between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The book exemplifies her core belief that tolerance and understanding can transcend religious and ethnic boundaries.

The Big Green Tent (2010), a sweeping saga about the generation of the sixties written in 30 stories—a common form in Russian literature (from A Hero of Our Time to Kolyma Tales, and even Sorokin’s The Norm or Telluria, to name a few). Three school friends travel the path from youthful idealism through dissidence to emigration, prison, or death. Ulitskaya places personal stories within the context of the country's history: samizdat, kitchen conversations, the Red Square demonstration against troops entering Czechoslovakia, and so on.

Jacob's Ladder (2015) deepens the theme of historical memory through epistolary form, also quite widespread in contemporary Russian literature. Letters discovered in the family archive of the autobiographical heroine's grandfather unfold into a century-long family saga. In the novel, Ulitskaya shows how personal memory opposes official history, how letters and diaries preserve what power seeks to erase, ignore, or forget. The novel’s built on a counterpoint of times: letters from the Gulag are juxtaposed with modernity, once again revealing that seeming cyclicity of tragedies.

Ulitskaya's moral authority in Russian society is hard to overestimate. Her books are translated into over forty languages which has made her the most recognisable contemporary Russian author abroad: she received The Medici Prize in France, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for contributions to women's literature, and Germany's Erich Maria Remarque Prize (Ulitskaya is also regularly featured on lists of potential Nobel Prize nominees).

Beyond her literary work, she's been an active voice in civil society during the 2011-2012 anti-Putin protests. When Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, Ulitskaya like many Russian intellectuals spoke against it, emphasising that “...Culture has suffered a cruel defeat in Russia, and we, people of culture, cannot change our state's suicidal politics. A split has occurred in our country's intellectual community: once again, as at the beginning of the century, only a minority opposes the war. My country brings the world closer to a new war every day; our militarism has already sharpened its claws in Chechnya and Georgia, and now trains in Crimea and Ukraine. Farewell, Europe, I fear we shall never succeed in joining the European family of nations. Our great culture — our Tolstoy and Chekhov, our Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, our artists, performers, philosophers, scientists — could not turn around the politics of the communist idea’s religious fanatics in the past, nor the greedy madmen of today...” After the war began in 2022, the 79-year-old writer emigrated to Germany, and in March 2024 she was declared a foreign agent by the Russian government, which is an absurd label for someone who truly and deeply loves her country and who’s spent her life defending humanistic values.

§2.2 Sergei Lebedev's novel Oblivion (2010) is one of the first 21st-century works directly addressing the Gulag's legacy and mechanisms of collective forgetting. The nameless narrator, raised in the late Soviet Union, travels to abandoned uranium mines on the edge of the Siberian taiga to uncover the secret of "Second Grandfather," a blind neighbour at the dacha who saved his life with a blood transfusion after a dog attack. This journey happens to be an archaeological investigation of Soviet terror: amongst the ruins of barracks and forgotten camps, the narrator discovers a world consigned to oblivion, both victims and executioners. The narrative in Oblivion is a continuous stream of consciousness free of dialogue but saturated with vivid and terrifying images with extraordinary poetic power: skulls, stacks of corpses, bodies frozen in permafrost, lorries with bones under bloodied tarpaulin. The novel’s particularly relevant in the context of Putin's Russia, where the history of communist terror has been replaced by myths of a great past, there's still no national monument to millions of victims of Soviet terror, yet constantly deranged calls resound to restore monuments to Stalin, which does, in fact, happen now and then, not without resistance, fortunately.

§2.3 Other authors include, but not limited to:

• Guzel Yakhina, who became a national literary sensation of the 2010s with her work now translated to many languages, wrote a trilogy about forgotten peoples: Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes (2015) about dispossessed Tatars later adapted into a TV series, My Children (2018) about Volga Germans, Echelon to Samarkand (2021) about the 1920s famine.

• Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory (2017) is a prime example of how themes of both cultural and personal memory and history can be delivered in the most experimental way. The book is a hybrid of essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents, an attempt to recover a family history following the death of her grandmother and to piece together how her seemingly ordinary Russian-Jewish family survived the 20th century's persecutions.

§3 Magical realism is the third axis in contemporary Russian literature. Unlike straightforward new realism (historical or not) or futuristic fantasy, magical realism is a fine balance of both, allowing discussion of the inexpressible through light surrealism and metaphors of miracle and myth.

§3.1 Eugene Vodolazkin has an academic background in Old Russian literature and language, which is what shaped his novel Laurus (2012), one of the most discussed books of the past decade. It is a story about the life of a healer Arseny progressing from sin to sanctity in medieval Rus. Even though it's set in the past, Vodolazkin categorised Laurus as a “non-historical novel.” He deliberately mixes epochs, such as characters from the 15th century can discuss 21st-century problems speaking in a combination of Old and modern Russian, mixing archaisms with contemporary slang, plus, of course, that famous plastic bottle. These anachronisms, both in language and in details, are meant to convey the philosophical pillar of the book: time is illusory, all epochs coexist in eternity (at least in Russia).

After his beloved Ustina’s death in childbirth, the protagonist atones for sin through serving people, transforming successively into a healer, a holy fool named Ustin, a pilgrim to Jerusalem, and then eventually becomes the monk Laurus. In Vodolazkin's magical realism miracles happen mundanely, without pathos: Arseny heals by touch, foresees the future, levitates during prayer, etc. and yet it’s all presented as a natural part of the medieval worldview.

Despite its relatively modest size, the book walks us through Arseny's entire life, striking in how quickly and easily it reads without creating any sense of haste.

Laurus won a few major Russian literary prizes, was translated into thirty languages, and was even put on The Guardian’s list of Top 10 Novels about God. Western critics compared the novel to Umberto Eco for its paradoxical combination of postmodernist play with deep religiosity. Vodolazkin created a special type of magical realism, somewhat Christian Orthodox magical realism, where miracle isn’t exotic but a path to understanding that “love is stronger than death.”

§3.2 Mariam Petrosyan has a special place in contemporary Russian literature. Armenian by origin, animator by training, she spent eighteen years writing her only three-part novel The Grey House (2009), which became a cult phenomenon in post-Soviet space. A legend goes that Petrosyan showed the unfinished manuscript to friends in Moscow where it circulated as samizdat until — miraculously or with the friend's help — it reached a publisher. It's a 700-page epic saga about a boarding school for disabled children who live in and create themselves an quasialternative universe. The novel, however, isn't about disabilities but about characters’ personalities with their intrigues, love stories, cruelty, and tenderness. The House thus becomes a microcosm with a complex hierarchy, its own slang, legends about past graduates, and secret passages between worlds. The beauty of the novel is it works on many levels: as a coming-of-age story, as a metaphor for society, as a meditation on otherness and acceptance. It’s a work about how marginality becomes a source of strength, and physical weakness is compensated by rich inner life.

The novel’s success spawned an unprecedented fan movement for contemporary Russian literature: readers create illustrations that later may end up in official printed editions, write fanfiction, analyse symbolism, organise costume meetings; the fans even opened a thematic cafe! Translations into English, French, and other European languages made the novel accessible to international readers and confirmed that the House is a universal space where everything's possible except ordinary life.

§3.3 More books:

• Three Apples Fell from the Sky (2015) by Narine Abgaryan, another Armenian writer based in Russia. It is a story about an Armenian village where small miracles happen, and was compared to Márquez by some reviewers.

• Vladimir Sharov wrote in what critics call “magical historicism” — a genre that “unlike magic realism, grapples with history rather than social issues or psychology.” His novels Before and During (2015) and The Rehearsals (2018) depict a Russia where “there is no consensus on the crucial issues of historical memory.” In his novels, characters try to comprehend Russia's endless repetitions, the dead chat with the living, and Soviet history merges with Biblical narratives.

§4 Experimental literature presents a particular problem of defining boundaries, for practically any contemporary Russian novel might seem experimental to some degree. If you look at the above-mentioned authors, they all employ literary techniques that one can consider experimental. Russian literary tradition inherently gravitates towards philosophy, polyphony, and non-linearity. It's common for it to treat time freely, mix voices, registers, mediums, experiment with language, all of which would exceed the bounds of the 19th-century Russian novel. However, within Russian literature itself there has always existed a separate line of more radical formal exploration, ascending to the Futurists and OBERIU, suppressed in Soviet times when artists were persecuted for “formalism,” revived in the 1960s-80s underground, and breathing freely in the ‘90s and after. Such prose demands the reader's active participation and readiness for the complex, unusual, and weird, transforming reading into intellectual adventure.

§4.1 Mikhail Shishkin, unlike most in today's article, voluntarily emigrated from Russia years ago, and also writes essays and non-fiction in German, including sometimes being involved in translations of his Russian novels. He's also a writer who's achieved all possible national literary prizes in Russia and was compared by critics simultaneously to Tolstoy and Joyce. His prose is somehow both concise and maximalist, classical in essence yet postmodern in form, often plotless yet poignant and deeply affectionate. He has acknowledged many influences, saying, “Bunin taught me not to compromise, and to go on believing in myself. Chekhov passed on his sense of humanity — that there can't be any wholly negative characters in your text. And from Tolstoy I learned not to be afraid of being naïve.”

I'd talk about Taking Izmail (2000) here, which happens to be one of my favourite books, but it was written in the 90s, albeit late 90s, and doesn't qualify for the definition of “contemporary” I've chosen for the article. However, to my surprise, I couldn't find its published English translation, even though some sources mention it exists, and, to my bigger surprise, a new translation might be coming out this year (?!) — something to look forward to. Moreover, like contemporary Russian prose at large, the book was influenced by one of my all-time favourites — Sasha Sokolov’s A School For Fools (1976), as Shishkin himself said. So, I decided to make an exception.

Izmail was a fortress, taken and lost by Russian forces numerous times in history. Shishkin uses it as a metaphor for the task of writing a novel and living life itself, and the scope of the task is conveyed through a masterfully interwoven undemarcated panoply of stories from different times and settings in Russia. The stories begin as suddenly as they end, often without resolution, immediately shifting to the next one, and closer to the end of the book even become autobiographical. Despite that, miraculously, catharsis and resolution don't seem necessary and you don't feel lost when suddenly finding yourself in a new story. Scenes that flow one into another have huge emotional weight and manage to create a sense of unease, for often they are filled with internal micro cliffhangers after which something bad always happens. This hypnotises you into anxiety because you start expecting that: characters getting ill, making impulsive decisions that ruin their lives, losing relatives, reminiscing on past tragedies, etc. in short, being at the whim of Fate. Even with glimpses of hope and many warm scenes, nothing seems to end well, and the book and the life described within it really appear like a fortress, as concluded by Shishkin's father in one of the autobiographical chapters: “This life, Mishka, has to be taken like a fortress.”

Shishkin's other works are also largely plotless and impressionistic, written in experimental forms, even though, as I keep saying, they are pretty widespread in contemporary Russian literature. For example, Maidenhair (2005) is a collage of Russian refugees’ stories that a translator records in a Swiss migration office. It combines real testimonies about the Chechen war with stories and fragments from fictional diaries without clear distinction between them. The Light and the Dark (2010) develops the theme of overcoming time through word and language via correspondence between lovers separated by war and writing from different epochs, possibly not even reading each other's letters. All three novels share themes of reality, life, death, memory, love, and resurrection that are common in other Shishkin's works.

Parallel to his literary work, Shishkin maintains active journalistic engagement taking a strong stance against Putin's “corrupt criminal regime,” as he described it back in 2013. Since then, his anti-Putin articles regularly appear in leading Western publications and he wrote a non-fiction book “My Russia: War or Peace?” where he openly calls Putin's Russia a fascist country, goes over many of the country's problems and their historical roots, as well as indirectly tries to answer those two eternal questions.

§4.2 Now, I’ll break my own rules and do a small digression from the established format. You must read Sasha Sokolov, and I’m not kidding. He's a living legend, praised by Nabokov who was known for stinginess in praising his contemporaries, called by some “the last Russian writer,” escaped to the USA in the 70s, now lives in Canada teaching skiing. Even though he hasn't published a novel for a while, his works A School For Fools and Between Dog and Wolf are peak Russian literature and nothing like you’ll read anywhere else. Even though you might've not heard of him, he’s one of those literary figures who influenced whole generations of authors, including myself. A School For Fools is the story of a nameless, schizophrenic boy studying in a special school with other children like himself, which he narrates with the assistance of his other self, trying to write a book. He describes his relationships with peers, parents, teachers, one of whom he falls in love with, completely ignores the chronology, often within one sentence, and eventually decides to stop writing because… I won’t tell you why. Sokolov’s prose is unique in many indescribable ways, relies on sound a lot, and is able to render a character’s interiority often disturbing realism.

§4.3 Read Valeria Narbikova. Day Equals Night, or, The Equilibrium of Diurnal and Nocturnal Starlight (1988) is nothing like anything, truly a hidden gem. It’s one of my favourite books along with A School For Fools. The premise of it is a very simple menage à trois, which is only a backdrop for remarkable exploration of the mind of a protagonist, her internal and external relationships with others, the world, literature, logic itself. It’s full of allusions, subversions, surreal encounters, and what I’d call “controlled chaos” both of the mind and the narrative itself. Rarely do I find a piece of literature that would resonate with me so much on a stylistic and some unexplainable spiritual level. Narbikova was among the Russian literary stars in the 90s and even was on an evening show on national TV in 1996, which is rather unbelievable for an avant-garde writer almost anywhere and says something about the country we could have had but lost. What’s more surreal is the guy who interviewed her has become a major propaganda mouthpiece now. While remaining well-known and esteemed in small literary circles, Narbikova’s work didn’t “appeal” to publishers, for it was considered “alienating for a mass reader,” creating an aura of impossibility of collecting all of her work since they are all out of print. Sadly, she passed away last year, which I only discovered a month after that, upon finishing Day Equals Night.

§5 And so, this is… I don't want to say “the end,” because this list properly has no end in sight. There's much more you can find in translation these days, including books that were written a century ago and only now are being translated. Polka, an educational project on Russian literature I trust and read regularly, created their own list of the 100 greatest Russian books of the 21st century. The list is in Russian, but translation technologies are advanced enough for you to navigate it and find works that might be interesting for you. My compilation is very limited, only a slice that should give a general sense of the state of contemporary literature in Russian, of course biased by my own preferences for literary fiction over mainstream. After talking about today’s topic with my friend Konstantin Asimonov, we decided to include an extra list he kindly compiled for you in the postscriptum, a selection of books that demand translation and you should look forward to.

Looking at the most relevant authors now, their books, and keeping in mind others who didn't find space in the article but nonetheless deserve attention, we can trace the path from the 90s’ wild and chaotic postmodernism towards a new synthesis where experimental form serves to comprehend tragic content — perhaps the main characteristic of many novels mentioned in this article. Russian literature remains largely contextual, culturally dependent, potentially making it more incomprehensible to foreign, especially Western, readers. If 19th-century literature, despite its “exoticisms,” like strange names, was largely European by basic criteria, contemporary Russian literature has seemingly travelled farther from that. One might expect that in the country of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Dostoevsky, literary tradition would be their logical continuation, but we see quite the opposite, nay orthogonal. Of course, the great classics remain “pillars” and inspirations, but have long ceased being “idols” or role models newest generations of writers strive to imitate. Despite the fact that we keep using the word “Russian” to refer to it, it used to be a completely different country with completely different culture that is now unrecognisable due to the sequence of catastrophes that happened to it. So maybe Taking Izmail really remains a universal Russian metaphor.

I’ll conclude my part with two quotations:

Russian literature is not merely a form of language's existence, but a means for non-totalitarian consciousness to persist in Russia. It has wedged itself into the fissure between a bark of command and a groan of suffering. Its language is a defence, an islet of words upon which human dignity must be preserved. This is my struggle, my war.

— Mikhail Shishkin

Mass culture is Big Culture, whether we like it or not. And people only develop interest in something interesting. What happens with us is this: there are many people who suppose they should generate interest because they continue the Russian literary tradition and represent “real literature,” “big culture,” and the mainstream. In fact they represent nothing except their own heartburn. And the pendulum's unlikely to swing their way without some new Glavlit. But Russian literary tradition has always developed through self-negation, so those trying to “continue” it have nothing to do with it.

— Viktor Pelevin

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P.S. Five Russian books that deserve immediate translation, according to Konstantin

When Vanya shared with me his gargantuan task, I immediately volunteered to write the most useless part: about books not yet available in English, in the meek hope that a forward-thinking and proactive editor sees this and takes action. There are two necessary disclaimers before we get to the meat of things. First, this is my personal list, and it may not reflect the consensus, whatever the hell that is. Second, the Western reader must realise there's no such thing as “Russian literature” anymore, definitely not since 2022. There are at least two literatures now, the one “for” and the one “against” (which is a topic for a whole other article). I tried to compile this list of those who, at the very least, are not “for.”

1. Eugene Vodolazkin, The Aviator (2015). Vodolazkin's probably more famous for his cowl-and-censer anachronistic opus Laurus, but The Aviator, his later novel about memory, love, and forgiveness, is perhaps even more interesting and emotionally affecting. A young man wakes in a modern hospital without any understanding of who he is. The doctor recommends he start a diary and record everything that comes back to him, but all he can remember is St Petersburg on the eve of the Revolution. No relation to Leonardo DiCaprio.

2. Alexei Salnikov, The Petrovs in the Flu and Around It (2016). A chthonic and acidic novel by writer and poet Alexei Salnikov describes a normal working-class Russian family that falls into a lucid-dream-like reality when the husband, Petrov Sr, catches a nasty flu, welding together the mundane and the mythological. Despite the macabre and bizarre, the book still reads like a documentary for anyone who had the mis/fortune of living in Russia in the early 2000s. The novel was later made into a film written and directed by Kirill Serebrennikov.

3. Alexei Ivanov, Tobol (2017). Ivanov's one of the most solid and stable Russian authors working today, and you can be sure his every book is pedantically researched, expertly written, and absolutely unputdownable, whether he writes about the woes of a provincial middle school teacher (The Geography Teacher Drank His Globe Away) or ancient Ural shamans (The Heart of Parma). Tobol, however, is an absolute masterpiece of a historical novel, with G.R.R. Martin's approach to plot and Leo Tolstoy's approach to loving and understanding one's country.

4. Eduard Verkin, The Crow Biter (2019). Verkin’s a strange one: a writer who very comfortably occupies a niche of nostalgic young adult romance books, which are mostly about mosquito bites and broken hearts. Once in a while he also writes a “grown-up” novel, full of what Russians call “chernukha,” an overly pitch-dark pit of despair that's a reflection of everyday Russian life. The Crow Biter is a unique gem that combines the two, taking the best of each, wrapping deep and profound observations of the Russian province in a wrapper of light-heartedness and idiotic adolescent humour.

5. Anna Starobinets, Vixens’ Crossings (2022). Starobinets works in several genres, defined by herself as “horror and supernatural fiction for adults, and also fairy and detective stories for children.” Vixens’ Crossings is firmly in the first category, despite having both fairy and detective elements as well. It's a bold and epic novel, taking place in a small Manchurian village in 1945, which features KGB agents, ex-circus hypnotists, a mystical baron, man-killing tigers, inhuman experiments and, of course, ancient fox spirits. The novel's unapologetically fast, with all seven hundred of its pages flying by like bullets from a Maxim machine gun. Anna Starobinets was once dubbed “Russian Stephen King,” and in many ways, rightfully so.

Vanya Bagaev is a Russian-British writer of experimental and speculative fiction. He writes about weird characters in whimsical situations, employing a lot of unhinged dialogue, absurd, dark and dank humour, dreamlike sequences, hysterical surrealism, magical realism, sudden philosophical and psychological romps, stylised prose, often infused with poetry, witty comedy, poignant twists, Russianness, logic and lunacy, literary anarchy, magic degeneracy, and many other sublime matters. Deleted Scenes from the Bestselling Utopian Novel is his first novel. Vanya's other work is available on his Substack Nova Nevédoma.

Photograph of Valeria Narbikova