Bradley A. Gorski, "Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode Title: Bradley A. Gorski, "Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism" (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)
Air Date: September 19, 2025
Host: Maria Lipman
Guest: Dr. Bradley A. Gorski

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Overview

This engaging episode centers on Bradley A. Gorski’s book, Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism. The discussion explores the dramatic transformation of Russian literary culture following the collapse of the Soviet Union, focusing on the interplay between literature’s storied traditions and the turbulent emergence of a capitalist book market. The episode delves into the anxieties, challenges, and adaptations encountered by writers, publishers, and readers as Russian literature navigated the post-Soviet commercial sphere, and considers the long-term impact on the literary field up to contemporary Russia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Personal Encounter with Russian Literature and Entry into the Field

• Gorski shares how reading Nabokov's Lolita in high school inspired his study of Russian, citing Nabokov’s lament—“my private tragedy... is that I had to give up my rich, untrammeled, and infinitely docile native tongue for a second rate brand of English.”

“If this book that I just got done reading, if this is second rate, then I have to read him in Russian.” (03:01, Bradley Gorski)

• A deepening interest in contemporary Russian literature led Gorski to immerse himself in post-Soviet literary events and reviews.

“I became fascinated at least as much with these aspects of literature beyond the text.” (04:22, Bradley Gorski)

2. The Cultural Impact of the Soviet Collapse

• Lipman underscores the relative neglect of the cultural angle compared to political and economic analyses.
• Gorski details how Russian literature, unlike sectors attempting to "catch up" with the West, maintained unique anxieties about balancing great literary traditions with the new market-driven publishing industry.

3. The Transformation of the Book Market: From Central Planning to Chaotic Capitalism

• Initial explosion: From 200 state-controlled publishers to thousands of private publishers within a few years.
• The abruptness and disarray of the post-Soviet market disrupted established systems, exposing the “invisible” mechanics behind book production.
• Gorski quotes publisher Buddy Stein’s reflection on the transition:

“Thus ended the serene time of the great independence...The time of the great bacchanali of the book market began.” (14:22, quoting Buddy Stein)

4. Early Post-Soviet Book Market: Avalanche of Literature and Piracy

• The 1990s saw an overwhelming glut of literature, spurred by both pent-up demand from the "journal boom" under glasnost and the influx of pirated and translated mass-market works.
• Example: Piracy was rampant, with anticipated titles “stolen” and reproduced ahead of official publication, as with the sequel to Gone with the Wind.
• Many Russian writers, supported by Soviet-era structures, were left underemployed as translated and commercial literature surged in popularity.

5. The Advent and Russianization of the Bestseller

• Russian publishing borrowed the mechanical form of Western bestseller lists (i.e., New York Times) but adapted them, including unique sub-lists such as "intellectual bestsellers" based on select Moscow bookstores.

“My favorite difference is that the Russian bestseller lists also included a sub-list that I’ve never seen anywhere else...a list of intellectual bestsellers.” (29:55, Bradley Gorski)

• These lists attempted to accommodate both mass-market sales and preserve a space for "serious" literature but ultimately subsumed all output under the logic of the market.

6. Fiction Content: The Market as a Theme in Literature

• Gorski analyzes how writers grappled with market success:
  • Market “success” and “selling out” became a topic for literary negotiation—a collision between literary value and capitalist appeal.
  • Detective fiction by Lev Gursky (Rahman Arbitman) and more serious authors like Boris Akunin blend pulp and prestige, staging their own internal negotiation between literature and commerce.

“They are constantly sort of navigating between these two traditions. And I argue...they try to sort of externalize that collision that they feel in their everyday lives into these works in really interesting ways...” (37:07, Bradley Gorski)

7. Sociological Shifts: The Russian “Success Story”

• Citing the late sociologist Boris Dubin:

“One of the phenomena in the current Russian literature is that there appears, there is appearing a Russian version of the American success story.” (38:34, Maria Lipman)

• The “success” ideal swiftly permeated pop culture and literature, a pattern echoed in phenomena like the notorious MMM investment company ads—propagating capitalist optimism while masking destructive realities underneath.
• Dubin also warns against overvaluing the “failures” of literary history, encouraging balanced attention to both commercial and artistic achievements.

8. Case Study: Zakhar Prilepin and the Failure of Cultural Capitalism

• Prilepin’s trajectory—from acclaimed writer to figurehead of pro-war “Z-literature”—exemplifies the ultimate failure of hopes for a market-driven, pluralistic cultural sphere.
• Gorski contrasts Prilepin’s embrace of “violent transcendence” with the utopian alternatives advanced by leftist writers (e.g., Alexander Skidan).

“Prilepin is an extraordinarily talented writer, an extraordinarily talented self promoter and an extraordinarily odious human being.” (48:56, Bradley Gorski)

9. Market Consolidation and State Capture

• The wild, chaotic publishing boom of the 1990s gave way to ruthless consolidation through mergers and acquisitions.
• By 2012, a near-monopolistic system emerged—Exmo and ASTE merged, controlling over half the Russian publishing market, with the remaining dominated by state-aligned entities.

“When there’s a full scale invasion in 2022 and you need to take undesirable authors off the market, it is very convenient to have a single monolithic monopoly…” (58:14, Bradley Gorski)

• Market mechanisms, initially intended to insulate against authoritarianism, instead enabled governmental control over literature as political repression increased.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the unrealized potential of capitalism-fueled literary culture:

  “Capitalism, free market capitalism, should not be compatible with authoritarianism… And it’s only, you know, 30 years later and we see that in fact, authoritarian governments have no problem creating a symbiotic relationship with capitalism in exactly the way it developed in these states.” (58:52, Bradley Gorski)

• On the “great independence” of Soviet publishing:

  “The independence of print runs from the reader, of prices from the cost of paper, of author, payments from content. The time of the great independence had ended and the time of the great bacchanali of the book market began.” (14:24, quoting Buddy Stein)

• On the contradictory hopes of the early 1990s:

  “This coincidence between demand for great literature and the beginnings of market reasoning...allowed the literary intelligentsia to buy into this kind of utopian fantasy of market capitalism that…readers would finally be free to demand great literature, right? Of course, this isn’t how it turned out.” (24:19, Bradley Gorski)

• On violence and the longing for transcendence:

  “The disposition of capitalism, when everything can be converted into everything else, everything is subject to replacement, activates a longing for something absolute that cannot be turned into a commodity. All totalitarian structures play on that longing.” (49:44, quoting Alexander Skidan)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:50–04:22 — Gorski’s introduction to Russian literature via Nabokov and post-Soviet immersion
• 07:12–09:17 — Literary tradition vs. attempts to “catch up” in the book market
• 12:20–16:14 — The chaos of the early-1990s publishing market
• 18:01–19:39 — Publisher boom and bust in the 1990s
• 21:44–24:59 — The late Soviet “journal boom” and the first emergence of market demand
• 28:46–31:10 — Russianization of bestseller lists, including “intellectual bestsellers”
• 32:08–37:07 — Content changes: detective fiction, the “success story,” and literary genre blending
• 38:34–43:44 — Boris Dubin, the culture of success, and the influence of mass media
• 47:01–51:15 — Zakhar Prilepin, leftist responses, and the commodification of violence
• 53:00–58:40 — Market consolidation, the rise of a publishing monopoly, and entanglement with authoritarianism

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Conclusion

Gorski’s Cultural Capitalism offers a nuanced and compelling account of Russian literature’s ongoing negotiation with late 20th and early 21st-century capitalism. The book and interview chart the grand visions, everyday challenges, and ultimate ironies of the literary marketplace after socialism—a story at once distinctively Russian and strikingly relevant for cultural industries worldwide.

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For Further Reading & Listening:

• Bradley A. Gorski, Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism (Northern Illinois UP, 2025)
• Boris Dubin’s essays on culture and sociology
• Alexander Skidan’s work on art and capitalism

Transcript

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[Maria Lipman]

Welcome to the New Books Network. This is Maria Lipman. I write capsule reviews of Russia related books for the Foreign Affairs. It is my great pleasure to talk with Bradley Gorski about his recent book Cultural Literature and the Market after Socialism, published by Cornell University Press in 2025. Hi Bradley, thank you for speaking with me today.

[Bradley Gorski]

Thank you so much for having me.

[Maria Lipman]

So Russian literature has been for a very, very long time of special attraction to foreign readers. And not infrequently. Reading Tolstoyo Dostoevsky in high school turned out to be a formative experience which actually inspired a person's choice of their future field and their profession. And not necessarily in literary studies. For some who became historians or analysts of foreign affairs, somehow reading great Russian literature was a source of inspiration. Now, what about you? How did you discover Russian literature and how did it define your choice of your academic field? The cultural market was hardly your first choice as far as Russian literature was concerned.

[Bradley Gorski]

Yeah, absolutely. This sounds a lot like my story, definitely. But for me it was Lolita Nabokov's work and in that book which I.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Read when I was in high school.

[Bradley Gorski]

He has this afterword where he says, my private tragedy, which cannot be anyone else's concern, is that I had to give up my rich, untrammeled, and infinitely docile native tongue for a second rate brand of English. And of course, I thought, if this book that I just got done reading, if this is second rate, then I have to read him in Russian. So, you know, of course I fell right into his trap. And like lots of literary traps and mystifications, this one went deeper than I thought. And it was ultimately really rewarding at the end. So I studied Russian college, and then I lived and worked in Russia for about five years after graduating from undergraduate.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And I, at that time really started.

[Bradley Gorski]

To be interested in the contemporary scene. I went to book launches, I followed prize lists and even wrote a few reviews for small publications, which brought me into the kind of post Soviet Russian literature which I found really fascinating, if often baffling too.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But the other thing that my time with Nabokov gave me was a kind.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of appreciation for the art and machinations beyond the text. Right? Nabokov is really interested in building his own mythology, his own kind of literary success, and he's very conscious about it.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so as I kind of like.

[Bradley Gorski]

Immersed myself in this post Soviet Russian.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Literature, I became fascinated at least as.

[Bradley Gorski]

Much with these aspects of literature beyond the text.

[Maria Lipman]

Right. So you are talking about the post Soviet period, and for you, it was probably already after the collapse of the Soviet Union that you grew interested, seriously interested in Russian literature. And indeed, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an event of gigantic proportion. And lots of political scientists, analysts and observers have looked at the geopolitical, the economic and the social aspect of that transformative event. But it seems that the cultural aspect of the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union has been paid by much less attention. Is that right?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

I think that is probably right. I think the first wave of interest.

[Bradley Gorski]

Was really on the political and economic side.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But there's been a lot of really.

[Bradley Gorski]

Interesting work on the cultural aspect of the transition and the post Soviet years in the last several years. So I think that this has been a revived area of interest, and that's where I really came in. The culture is obviously huge. There's a ton of things going on in the culture. But literature specifically, I think, underwent an enormous amount of changes that imbricated with the political and the economic, but also redounded into literature, its forms, its meaning making capabilities, and how it developed and how it was received by the Russian public. So I wanted to not only think.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

About the Culture as this aspect of.

[Bradley Gorski]

The Soviet post Soviet transition that I think is getting a lot more attention recently. But think about it specifically in literature as this large and important but relatively narrow aspect of culture at large.

[Maria Lipman]

Yeah, I think we will talk about that in more detail a little later. But let me ask you a more general question. The early post Soviet Russia, especially the early ones I'm talking about 1990s, sought to imitate and to emulate the west in so many different spheres, in pop culture, in finance, in fast food, in fashion. And of course, even the framers of the Russian constitution were inspired by the charters, such as the American constitution or the French constitution. So this somehow implied a recognition that Russia had to catch up. It was somehow behind. This was certainly not true of literature, not the great literature, but maybe there was something to it if we look at the mass literature and various genres there.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah, this is a really interesting aspect.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of literature in this transitionary period, because the Russian literary tradition is, as you mentioned, not lagging behind the West. It's a huge aspect of world literature, and it's a pride of. Of Russia at the time and up to this day.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So Russian literature certainly was not trying.

[Bradley Gorski]

To catch up to the west in.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Sort of literary quality, but a lot.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of anxiety in the book market and publishing did want to catch up to the West.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So there was an editorial in the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Weekly industry newspaper called Knizhnaya Bazeriniya the.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Book review, in 1990, lamenting the fact.

[Bradley Gorski]

That we in Russia do not have a bestseller. We really need a bestseller because our.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Book market is totally chaotic and nobody.

[Bradley Gorski]

Knows exactly what's going on.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And what they have in developed markets in the west is this list of bestsellers that tells people what is selling now, what readers really want, and how.

[Bradley Gorski]

They can develop something new to sort of meet market demand.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so this idea of the market.

[Bradley Gorski]

As a sort of technological meeting place where people will be able to come.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Together, understand in a transparent way what.

[Bradley Gorski]

Is going on among readers, writers, publishers, you know, even suppliers of. Of raw material such as ink and paper, that needed to catch up to the west, even if literature as a sort of content mechanism didn't.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so you see these two sort of two aspects of literature having this.

[Bradley Gorski]

Tug of war throughout the 1990s where there's a lot of excitement about making a book market, a functioning book market in this sort of free market, Western ideal, idealized way, while at the same.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Time there's anxiety about, okay, well, even if we do this right, what happens.

[Bradley Gorski]

To great Russian literature?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So you get throughout the 90s, different.

[Bradley Gorski]

Sort of formations that come together.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

One, in 1993, a bunch of concerned publishers and writers come together and organize.

[Bradley Gorski]

An international conference in defense of the.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Book, is what they call it. And this was a big thing in Moscow. And it was designed to come up with policy solutions that would protect this.

[Bradley Gorski]

Very special part of Russian culture, Russian literature, from the ravages of the market, so it wouldn't just turn into sort of the pulp fiction that characterizes book markets the world over.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And they came up with solutions, including.

[Bradley Gorski]

Tax breaks for publishers, printing intellectual content.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Protections for the book industry as a whole. But.

[Bradley Gorski]

But no one really listened.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

The Yeltsin administration sent a delegate, but nothing was done.

[Bradley Gorski]

None of their adoptions were adopted, or, sorry, none of their suggestions were adopted.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So you can see how this kind of anxiety between the push of the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Book market to form this sort of like Western market, but nevertheless to protect our great tradition of Russian liter, comes really at this time period here as well.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And in a different part of the book.

[Bradley Gorski]

In chapter four, I talk about international circulation. So I talk about some of the most successful Russian authors abroad.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And there I found that even the most internationally successful Russian authors, they think.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of themselves often as kind of Russian first and foremost.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So in this chapter we see how, you know, authors have this great success abroad, but what they really want is.

[Bradley Gorski]

To bring that back home, to be successful within the great tradition of Russian literature.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And I argue that this really challenges.

[Bradley Gorski]

Some of the models of world literature advanced by scholars such as Pascal Casanova.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Who think that the sort of center.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of literary consecration is places like Paris or London or New York.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But the Moscow authors, even as they.

[Bradley Gorski]

Have success there, they're really interested in bringing that success back home.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So once again we have this sort.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of like tension between a world literary market that should be sort of this frictionless exchange of cultural goods, and a stubborn and long lasting belief in the greatness of Russian literature as a sort of distinct national tradition.

[Maria Lipman]

Yeah, fascinating. But I still would like you to talk about the advent of the market. Your book opens with a description of just how revolutionary the changes were and how chaotic. So would you please talk about that? What did the advent of the market mean? The withdrawal of state control, its replacement by the consumer demand. Please talk about that. The early, I think we mean the early to mid-1990s.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah, absolutely. And this is, as you mentioned, really.

[Bradley Gorski]

The subject of the first chapter of the book. And there I talk about really everything from paper prices to piracy to the breakdown of retail distribution networks, which was A state run thing in the Soviet Union, as everything else was and had to be be privatized through a long and agonistic process all the way up until the rise of Russia's first bestseller lists.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And the point that I try to make here is that it was a.

[Bradley Gorski]

Really chaotic churn of all these changes.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And it really revealed how complex this.

[Bradley Gorski]

Process is of getting a book from an author, writing a manuscript to the.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Readers, and has so many moving parts.

[Bradley Gorski]

That when they're stable and when they're state controlled, as they were in the Soviet Union, become almost invisible. But when they undergo these enormous changes, they really become visible and palpable and chaotic in ways that were previously unexpected to a lot of the authors, and not only authors, publishers, I think, maybe often first and foremost.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So I actually have a couple of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Epigraphs in the very beginning of the book where we have publishers talking about these, these changes.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And one of the things that I.

[Bradley Gorski]

Found really fascinating about doing this book.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Is the way that they see capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski]

Is totally different from the way that I, as an American growing up, more or less at the end of history, had understood capitalism. Right?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

They see it as something totally new.

[Bradley Gorski]

Totally different, and really difficult to understand. Instead of this sort of idea of capitalism as the way things ought to be, this sort of state of freedom without constraints or the natural way of the world.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So Buddy Stein, who is a publisher.

[Bradley Gorski]

Writing in 1991, talks about these changes in a really sort of counterintuitive way.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

He writes, thus ended the serene time.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of the great independence, the great independence being the time of the Soviet Union. The independence of print runs from the reader, of prices from the cost of paper, of author, payments from content. The time of the great independence had ended and the time of the great bacchanali of the book market began.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So Stein, of course, is being a.

[Bradley Gorski]

Little tongue in cheek here, but what.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

He'S expressing, I think is real, and I heard it from a lot of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Different informants in my research in a lot of different ways.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So capitalism lifted censorship, sure. So there's this aspect of freedom or independence, but it actually meant that you.

[Bradley Gorski]

As a publisher had a lot more to keep track of. So instead of receiving directives from above, tranches of paper from the state paper producer, and numbers of the print runs that you had to put out, you had to keep track of this constant negotiation between authors, raw materials, distribution networks.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Advertising sales, and so much more that.

[Bradley Gorski]

Now was part of that great bacchanale that he calls for in the book market.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So in other words, Capitalism, when it's.

[Bradley Gorski]

Not the background noise of your life, and it wasn't for all these late.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Soviet actors, it starts looking a lot different.

[Bradley Gorski]

It looks complicated, chaotic, decentralized.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And this is where the rise of.

[Bradley Gorski]

The bestseller starts to come in the 1990s.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Needed some kind of centralized way to.

[Bradley Gorski]

Understand what was going on in this book market and bestseller list promised to play that role.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But as I show in this first chapter, no sooner had they sort of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Become this kind of central node in the networks of post Soviet literature, then they became this kind of like site of manipulation, play and even literary innovation.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So I think that this again shows.

[Bradley Gorski]

This role of the technical side of literature being totally inseparable from the sort of, you know, meaning making side of literature as well.

[Maria Lipman]

Right. And I mean, the transition was really swift and really dramatic. And I would like you. This is in the book and this is what I admired a great deal in the book. Could you give a sense, maybe even a numerical sense of what happened to book publishers, to the book market? And you use this word chaotic, when you were answering my previous question, how chaotic actually was it? Again, you have it in the book. And I would really like you to share this knowledge with our listeners.

[Bradley Gorski]

Yeah, yeah.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So There were about 200 publishers operating.

[Bradley Gorski]

In the Soviet Union at any given time. And these were strictly state controlled. For various reasons, literature was considered ideologically sensitive material.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So you couldn't just buy a printing.

[Bradley Gorski]

Press, import it from abroad and start set up a publisher.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But once the law on cooperatives went.

[Bradley Gorski]

Into effect in the perestroika era, it.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Became possible to set up private publishers.

[Bradley Gorski]

And then even before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990, there was this thing called the law on print which finally lifted all censorship.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this is the very last years.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of the Soviet Union. But these are already sort of capitalist looking or proto capitalist looking sort of developments that allow this sort of openness in the book market.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so you get by the fall.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of the Soviet Union, there are already more than a thousand publishers working two or three years into the Soviet Union. There's more than 4,000.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And these publishers sort of come and.

[Bradley Gorski]

Go, a lot of them very quickly.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Even the very successful ones. So there are hugely successful publishers, such.

[Bradley Gorski]

As the northwest publishing house Sevara Zapad.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

In St. Petersburg, which exercises a lot.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of influence, makes a ton of money and really dominate a lot of the bookselling going out and around St. Petersburg.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But because of mismanagement, because of various.

[Bradley Gorski]

Actors within that book publishing falling victim to alcohol and drug abuse and other.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Things the publisher completely falls apart before.

[Bradley Gorski]

The end of the 1990s. Some of the people who stick around the publishing industry find work elsewhere. But that sort of incredibly fast development and incredibly fast disintegration of a major player in the literary field is really characteristic of the 1990s.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So it becomes really difficult for authors, publishers, critics to really understand where the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Ground is under their feet when they're trying to find where the next great work is coming from, where they should publish their work, and when readers are looking for what they want to read.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this sort of chaos, chaotic churn.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of new publishers all the time, publishers dying all the time, and the, the book market looking new and different constantly is, is, is really the subject of, I think the first half of the first chapter and is really a fascinating thing to kind of conjure up in our more stable, if, if more monolithic times.

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[Maria Lipman]

I guess a natural question arises of where did all this avalanche of literature come from? I mean market came forcefully into the new Russia, but the number of writers was still the same. I mean, why such an avalanche suddenly? What were they publishing? It was not obviously not only new writers or maybe even writers who could not be published in the state run publishing in the Soviet Union. So what was it? What fed this gigantic demand which later of course began a supply of the book market.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah, so this is a really interesting question and I think there's a lot.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of ways to start this story, but I think to understand really the demand of the book market and what it starts to look like, it might be even worth thinking about the late Soviet.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Years when we have this phenomenon that.

[Bradley Gorski]

I think a Lot of people have talked about when Soviet literary journals became incredibly popular.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this is known as the journal boom.

[Bradley Gorski]

This is at the end of the 1980s, when Gorbachev's glass nest policy starts allowing the publication of these long suppressed literary works.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And they all come out in these.

[Bradley Gorski]

Thick journals, and people are super excited, they can't get enough. So every issue sells out kind of immediately, and people pass them from hand to hand. It's all kind of all anyone can talk about.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And what's really interesting about this moment is this is before any of the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Reforms, the sort of liberalizing reforms have come in the law and cooperatives, or the law and print that I talked about.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But Ghoscom Pichat, which is the agency.

[Bradley Gorski]

That is in charge of journal circulation.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

They had always set the numbers of.

[Bradley Gorski]

How many copies of each journal is.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Published on an annual basis, but based.

[Bradley Gorski]

Partly on demand, but also partly on party priorities.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Because under Marxism, it is not supposed to be the sort of reader's demand.

[Bradley Gorski]

That determines how much the state supplies. It should be the ideological content, right? The party is supposed to lead the people and not the other way around.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But during this journal boom, that agency.

[Bradley Gorski]

Took the unprecedented step of increasing demand from month to month, or, sorry, increasing circulation numbers from month to month in direct response to demand, which, you know.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Might not seem like a big deal.

[Bradley Gorski]

From, from where we're sitting in 2025.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But under socialism, this was a big innovation. And so this was really this kind.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of early adoption of market thinking and market reasoning in this kind of not yet post Soviet world.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So a lot has been said about.

[Bradley Gorski]

This journal boom by other scholars before.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But one thing I think has not been previously appreciated is that this brief time when everyone was reading this previously.

[Bradley Gorski]

Suppressed and often really great literature, right? It's often difficult modernist literature by poets like Akhmatova and Mandelstam, prose writers like Bogacov, Solzhenitsyn, these kind of like really demanding literature, everyone was reading it, super popular. This was also the beginning of market reasoning in literature.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so this coincidence between demand for.

[Bradley Gorski]

Great literature and the beginnings of market reasoning, it kind of allowed the literary intelligentsia to buy into this kind of utopian fantasy of market capitalism that like in a free society, under a free market, readers would finally be free to demand great literature, right?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And that's, that's what the ideal of.

[Bradley Gorski]

A kind of like literary market would be.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Of course, this isn't how it turned out. So the journal boom ended even more.

[Bradley Gorski]

Abruptly than it started.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And soon all this translated Pope self.

[Bradley Gorski]

Help, celebrity biographies, all of this stuff kind of took over the demand.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So that was a long way to get back to. Your first question is what is being.

[Bradley Gorski]

Published at the very beginning of this time period?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Some publishers are really still trying to.

[Bradley Gorski]

Push this great literature. They saw that it had such high demand not long ago, and why isn't it, you know, still being under demand now?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But a lot of other publishers turn.

[Bradley Gorski]

To translation, translation of things that were bestsellers elsewhere. So in this book review, this weekly.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Trade publication, Kniznaya Bazerinie, it'll often print.

[Bradley Gorski]

The bestseller list from other countries, from Japan, from Poland, from other places, so that publishers can kind of see what might be worth translating. Oftentimes, this stuff was translated without authorization. Stephen King is rumored to have come to Russia and seen many of his books published and not known about that until he saw them for sale.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

There was an unauthorized or.

[Bradley Gorski]

Sorry, there was an authorized translation of the sequel to Gone with the Wind by an American author called Alexandra Ripley. And it was supposed to be published by the state publishing house Hudoj Nailiteraturatura.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And they launched a big advertising campaign, posters in the metro. Everybody knew this book was coming out.

[Bradley Gorski]

Everybody was excited about it, but everybody.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Was so excited about it that many other publishers stole the manuscript, including paying people at the.

[Bradley Gorski]

At the print office of Hudoschneid Literatura to steal the proofs and print them elsewhere. And all these other pirated copies came out before the official copy did. So when Hudo Schneider Literatura was supposed to publish it, everybody who wanted the copy already had one, and piracy sort of won the day.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So these kinds of machinations that go.

[Bradley Gorski]

On behind the literature were huge aspect of that early aspect of the literary market. This was not because there weren't enough writers in post Soviet Russia. The union of writers in the Soviet Union employed an enormous amount of writers who were often sort of underemployed in the amount of writing that they were doing, amount of published writing that they were doing. And because the market actually promoted a lot of these imported translated works over works written in Russian and original works, a lot of these people found themselves out of work. So there's an enormous, actually glut of supply of indigenous and indigent writers in the early 1990s. And that leads to some very interesting developments where native Russian speakers write works as if they are translated works from English or other Western languages and launch them as these sort of literary mystifications. Right.

[Maria Lipman]

So let's get back to the bestseller, of course, you mentioned the emergence and indeed an obsession of bestseller during the same early post communist period. Of course, the actual notion and the phenomenon of bestseller has been borrowed from the west, one of those economic market phenomena that have been borrowed. But apparently you're writing in the book there's a whole chapter devoted to bestsellers that like so many other things borrowed from the west, it was transformed in the early post Soviet, post communist period. Would you please talk about that?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah. So the bestseller lists, which there were.

[Bradley Gorski]

Actually several bestseller lists in post Soviet.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Russia, but the most prominent and long.

[Bradley Gorski]

Running of them runs in this industry weekly, the Knizhnaya Bazrinya the Book Review. And it's explicitly modeled on the New York Times bestseller list. So you have paperback and hardback bestsellers, you have fiction and non fiction bestsellers.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And this is despite the fact in.

[Bradley Gorski]

The Russian market, both in the Soviet and the post Soviet market, there is no real distinction between hard and softback, or at least those distinctions don't map onto the Anglophone distinctions. Same thing with fiction and nonfiction. There are many categories that are sort of native to the Russophone literature that might distinguish fiction and nonfiction, but fiction and nonfiction are not a sort of binary category in Russian literature and never have been. Nevertheless, those aspects were adopted. So you have top 10 lists in all of those things.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But my favorite difference is that the Russian bestseller lists also included a sub.

[Bradley Gorski]

List that I've never seen anywhere else, I haven't heard of anywhere else, and I would love to hear if others have seen this in other countries. But it was a list of interest, intellectual bestsellers.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And this was put together through surveys.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of three to five intellectual, quote unquote, intellectual bookstores in Moscow.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And it included everything from translations of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Borges to religious philosophy to poetry, to, you know, difficult literature that might not appear on the. The general list. So the idea of these lists, or at least the. The purported idea, is that they're kind of trying to elevate intellectual l and make it part of this bestseller conversation.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So these, you know, these intellectual books.

[Bradley Gorski]

Would never make it onto a bestseller list on their own, but here they are presented alongside the bestsellers of the day.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But I think that was probably the intention. But what actually happens is that these lists end up subsuming intellectual culture under.

[Bradley Gorski]

The logic of the market. So now everything, including intellectual bestsellers, sort of matters most when it sells best.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so I think that this is.

[Bradley Gorski]

A really interesting example of this kind.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Of intention of trying to carve out.

[Bradley Gorski]

A place for intellectual cultural production within a broad market paradigm. That actually ends up giving more power to the market paradigm by not by kind of refusing to protect some part of cultural production from the market as such.

[Maria Lipman]

Right. So let's probably get more to the content of that literature and especially new literature that was being written during that early period in the 1990s. So in your book, you're writing about the influence of the advent of the market and the hopes laid on the market as a good thing, how it affected the contents of literature and how the topics, the plots, such as market success, entered new Russian literature.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah, so this is a really interesting.

[Bradley Gorski]

Aspect of.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Capitalism in general, but especially.

[Bradley Gorski]

How capitalism interacts with culture, narrative culture and literature specifically. So this is mostly tackled in the second chapter of the book where I.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Talk about this kind of demand that.

[Bradley Gorski]

Capitalism puts on those who want to be successful within the terms of capitalism, to kind of buy into its terms.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so that means that success and.

[Bradley Gorski]

Market success, selling well, ought to be a good thing.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And this doesn't seem like a giant leap to make, but in a lot of literature and literary context and artistic context as well, playing too much to.

[Bradley Gorski]

The market can have the ring of selling out. But in a market paradigm, you want to be able to sell without kind of selling out.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So I look at this group of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Authors who stage in their works these sort of conflicts between literature as literature and the market.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And I analyze these texts by kind of trying to see how maybe these.

[Bradley Gorski]

Texts come to a rapprochement, a kind of agreement, begrudging at times winking, at times ironic, at times sometimes fully sincere, between the demands of literature and the demands of. Of the market itself.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So the first book that I look at is something that has not been.

[Bradley Gorski]

Translated into English, and probably nobody has read outside of a few lovers of post Soviet detective novels.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And this is a group of a.

[Bradley Gorski]

Series of detective novels by Rahman Arbitman, who was writing under the pseudonym Lev Gursky.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And he writes this series of detective novels. But the interesting thing about this is.

[Bradley Gorski]

They are set in the book world.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And the book world is a world where things get a little dangerous at.

[Bradley Gorski]

Times, but it's not a typical backdrop for detective novels. But he comes up with this, with this world where it is kind of clash between, or a kind of mixture astiche of sort of 1990s criminal underworld and the 1990s book market. And in this world, his main character solves crime, and his main character comes.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Into this world because he used to.

[Bradley Gorski]

Be a police detective, but he had walked by a bookstall at one point. And couldn't resist stopping to buy a book.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And he realizes his real calling is.

[Bradley Gorski]

In the book world.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

He's a real bibliophile.

[Bradley Gorski]

He loves books, but he also loves being a detective.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this character is actually the one.

[Bradley Gorski]

Who bridges these two worlds more than. More than anybody else.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And what I.

[Bradley Gorski]

The first book in this series is a vast conspiracy, as all of these detective novels end up being, where some nefarious source has replaced all the deputies to the State Duma with doppelgangers. So everybody in this book is doubled. Everybody is not who they seem. Everybody kind of has a mask on that needs to be unmasked by this detective.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But the detective himself is the only.

[Bradley Gorski]

One who is real. He's the only one with a stable identity.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so I. I analyze this kind of, you know, Popey plot by suggesting that he is real because he is.

[Bradley Gorski]

The one who can sort of straddle these two worlds. He has one. One foot in the world of this criminal underworld of the 1990s and one foot in real literature.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And. And by the end of the book.

[Bradley Gorski]

He ends up solving the crime, of course, and, you know, addressing all the needs of the genre that he is in. But he, in the sort of falling action at the last pages of the novel, he meets up with his friend who is the proprietor of a bookshop called Yevgeny Onegin, and he has tea in the Eugene Onegin bookshop.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this. This, you know, detective who has been.

[Bradley Gorski]

Swashbuckling and solving crimes throughout this novel, ends up doing this for sort of very tame and intellig literary task of, you know, having tea with his friend in a bookshop.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this is the kind of thing.

[Bradley Gorski]

That I think gets encoded into even the pulp fiction that happens at this time. But some more prominent authors, such as Borisa Kunin, take a lot of the tropes of pulp fiction, detective novels, but implant them in a world that is woven from fabrics drawn from the great literary tradition of Russian 19th century realism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And he does this kind of clash.

[Bradley Gorski]

In a different way, where you have a lot of the sort of, like, aspects of literature from one side and aspects of literature from the other side. And they get woven together in a way that I think clashes throughout the world of his novels as well. So I think that all of these authors are kind of staging a collision between these two forces that are real important forces of their lives as authors who are both conscious of their positionality within Russian literature as a tradition, but also have to deal with the realities of the capitalist book market. So as authors, they are constantly sort of navigating between these two traditions. And I argue in this chapter that in many of these major works, they try to sort of externalize that collision that they feel in their everyday lives into these works in really interesting ways, in ways that create new forms of literature, as a Kunin does, or create new forms of authorial sort of behavior, as Victor Pelevin does when he does something, I think similar in his 1999 work, Generation P. Yeah, I hope you.

[Maria Lipman]

Will talk more about who happens to be a very interesting figure in the Russian literature, and you have a lot about him in the book. But I would like to dwell a little bit longer on this issue of how market is embracing literature. In the book, you quote Boris Dubin, who unfortunately no longer alive, but I think that he was one of the most insightful observers of the developments in the Russian society and in the Russian culture in the early post communist period. You quote him as saying that what is going on? One of the phenomena in the current Russian literature is that there appears, There is appearing a Russian version of the American success story. So what you were describing as applies to Akonin and Arbitman and maybe some others was something like a tongue in cheek. But what Dubin is talking about is not about tongue in cheek. So there was apparently some. A trend in the literature that was just simply embracing success is a good thing, and not just any success, but market success.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah, so this is a really interesting.

[Bradley Gorski]

Point, and I completely agree with your assessment of Boris Dubin, who was a really great cultural sociologist who died in 2014 and was a really sharp observer of late and post Soviet cultural developments, especially in literature, but not only sort of throughout the culture.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And I think one of the things that is really fascinating about Dubin is that he was able to read a.

[Bradley Gorski]

Ton of literature, both great literature and pulp fiction. He was also the translator of Borges. So his knowledge of sort of great literature and intricate postmodern literature was unsurpassed.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

At the same time, he was very.

[Bradley Gorski]

Interested in market success and very interested in figures like Alexandra Marinina, the most successful pulp fiction writer of the 1990s, and how their market success positioned them within the culture at large.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So Buddy Steuben is writing about this.

[Bradley Gorski]

New American dream is what he calls this sort of like, Russian ideal of capitalist success.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And what he's talking about in that essay is how actually a lot of people, according to these sociological surveys, that.

[Bradley Gorski]

He and a lot of his colleagues at the. What has become the Levada center, but.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Was at the time were conducting is that people actually identified more with success.

[Bradley Gorski]

Than they did with sort of being.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Part of the collective already in times.

[Bradley Gorski]

Like 1994, right, when there hadn't been that much time since the end of the Soviet Union.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And he traces this to a lot of more pop culture than literature, specifically. And there are a lot of, at.

[Bradley Gorski]

This time.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

TV commercials that portray success as something relatively easily attainable if you know how the capitalist system works and.

[Bradley Gorski]

How to sort of patiently wait for return on investment, how to work hard and buy the right things with what you have.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And in the book, I talk about how this actually coincided with these very, very popular TV commercials featuring a Russian.

[Bradley Gorski]

Everyday man called Leon, who invests a.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Little bit of money, gets it back, buys for his wife a pair of boots, and then invests a little bit.

[Bradley Gorski]

More money, buys his, for his wife.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

A big fur coat and so on.

[Bradley Gorski]

And so forth until he can buy a car, a house, a trip to the World cup to watch Russia play Brazil in the us where the World.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Cup was being hosted that year. And these TV commercials sell this very.

[Bradley Gorski]

Clear fantasy of what capitalist investment ought to look like.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

The big problem with this was that.

[Bradley Gorski]

These TV commercials were advertising, mmm. Which is the biggest pyramid scheme that hit post Soviet Russia.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this Leoni Golubkov and everybody he.

[Bradley Gorski]

Was talking to through the TV screen were investing in absolutely nothing at all. They were investing in air, and it all collapsed underneath them at that time.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But nevertheless, this ideal of what capitalist.

[Bradley Gorski]

Investment ought to look like and what capitalist sort of work and return on investment and how one ought to act under capitalism was propagated through these very simple demonstrations of sort of capitalist success.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

At the same time, though, Boris Dubin.

[Bradley Gorski]

Also writes an essay about the problem.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Of failure in literary history. So Dubin, as I mentioned, is this.

[Bradley Gorski]

Guy who can kind of bridge that world of capitalist success and these TV commercials. But also look at the sort of, like, history of literature itself.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And he says that we scholars of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Literature have too often overvalued failure.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

We see the struggling artist as the true artist. We see the artist who.

[Bradley Gorski]

Who has no market success is only true to his or her muse, that is the true artist.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And what we really need to do.

[Bradley Gorski]

Is understand how somebody like Pushkin, who, you know, might have been true to.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

His own muse, was nevertheless very well.

[Bradley Gorski]

Well read in his lifetime, right? And booksellers were very eager to buy his manuscripts, right?

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So we need to actually pay attention.

[Bradley Gorski]

To the phenomenon of success.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so what. What this ends up looking like in that chapter Is these authors kind of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Struggling between this romantic ideal of the author who ought not to be successful and the sort of like ideals of the literary market.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And in the case of Barisa Kunin.

[Bradley Gorski]

Which is a pseudonym taken on by a writer of the sort of late.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Soviet intelligentsia who was a.

[Bradley Gorski]

Who was educated in Oriental and Eastern.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Cultures and a well published critic and.

[Bradley Gorski]

Co editor of the literary journal International Literature at the time, Grigori Chakateshvili, he.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Really launches this ideal vision of the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Book market as a place that would actually honor success.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So he writes, not under the pseudonym.

[Bradley Gorski]

Barisakunin, but under his real name, a short sort of half joking manifesto that says if I were, I think, if I were a literary oligarch, so if he had endless money, basically he would fund a literary system that would really benefit those who had, you know, who had the talent to write great literature.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So he has this kind of like.

[Bradley Gorski]

Fantastical ideal, which he's kind of half joking about, but is kind of true about a literary system that where the sort of ideal of great literature and the ideal of success would actually be able to come together. And I show kind of through a lot of the ways that his then character, Barisakunin, who is the pseudonym under which he writes his most popular workshow he navigates interviews and how he presents himself in the world, that he is really trying to embody this type of author who can both be very successful and write, you know, acceptable and even great literature.

[Maria Lipman]

Yeah. I would also like you to speak a little bit about Prilipin, a very peculiar figure in the Russian literature and a very successful writer in a very interesting, I think, cultural phenomenon which you dissect interestingly in your book. So maybe say a few words about Prilipin before we move on.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Yeah, so Prilipin is a character writer.

[Bradley Gorski]

Who comes up late in the book.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

In part because he's of a sort.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of slightly younger generation. So he has his literary debut in.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

2013, but also because his particular trajectory.

[Bradley Gorski]

To me signals the end of the last hopes of cultural capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So the trajectory of the book ends up arguing that cultural capitalism and these.

[Bradley Gorski]

Kind of exuberant hopes in the market and the ability of the market to join sort of market, its success. And great Russian literature ultimately fail. And they fail for several reasons. One is ideological and the other is that they don't actually free literature from any dictates of the market itself.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But I end with Prilipin, for those of you who don't know. Pri Lepin is a writer who served.

[Bradley Gorski]

In the Second Chechen War in 1999, was also active in the red brown National Bolshevik party in the 1990s. And he wrote about these experiences in 2000s. And by the time of Putin's annexation of Crimea, he was a full supporter of Russia's violence in Ukraine. And in 2017 he took command of a pro Russian battalion in separatist Donetsk. Since the full scale invasion, he has become the kind of face of state aligned or Z literature. But my book ends in 2017 when he goes off to invade his country's peaceful neighbor.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And a couple of readers have seen.

[Bradley Gorski]

This ending as me arguing that this is the kind of inevitable end of cultural capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But I don't actually think that was inevitable. I think Pri Liepin is an extraordinarily.

[Bradley Gorski]

Talented writer, an extraordinarily talented self promoter and an extraordinarily odious human being.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And I don't think those two tendencies.

[Bradley Gorski]

Had to come together in a single author in the early 2000s. So let me sketch out a little bit why I think the failure of cultural capitalism could have gone differently and at the same time why I think it went the way that it did.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So I dedicate my epilogue to this.

[Bradley Gorski]

Group of leftist writers who more or less at the same time of PR Lipin's rise, mount what I consider the most articulate and effective critique of cultural capitalism. One of those writers is Alexander Skidan.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Who in 2003 writes this.

[Bradley Gorski]

The disposition of capitalism, when everything can be converted into everything else, everything is subject to replacement, activates a longing for something absolute that cannot be turned into a commodity. All totalitarian structures play on that longing.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So Skidane goes on to say that art's goal is to both deconstruct what.

[Bradley Gorski]

Totalitarianism has to offer and to offer something else. So art should offer a vision in Skidane's ideal and his colleague's ideal.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

It should be a utopian leftist vision. And I get into that a bit.

[Bradley Gorski]

In the epilogue, something that could appeal to that longing that goes, you know, for something that transcends the utter exchangeability of everything in capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But what I think we see in Prilepin is that he addresses that longing through violence. And, you know, he does it in this way that really appeals to this. This sense of Russian masculinity as something.

[Bradley Gorski]

That is both ready to be violent, but also has a sort of tender, lyrical and literary side. And I think that this connection or this comb of violence, violent masculinity and lyricism, is what really is effective with Prilepin.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And I do think that violence is often the most attractive and often most.

[Bradley Gorski]

Available path to this kind of transcendence that goes beyond the exchangeability of everything under capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So in that way I can see.

[Bradley Gorski]

How something like Prilepin is, if not inevitable, maybe more likely than a utopian leftist solution, for instance. And as we see with authoritarian governments throughout the world, there is an abiding attraction to violence as an answer to this longing for the absolute. But I don't think that it had to go that way. I do think that this sort of utter exchangeability, the fungibility of everything under capitalism, activates this longing that Skidane is talking about. But I. I think that that longing can be and ought to be addressed in ways that don't involve a valorization of organized violence.

[Maria Lipman]

Yeah. So I think probably my last question will take us back to the cultural market and to how the market has changed since the beginning of the post communist, post Soviet period and through, well, what you describe as a near monopoly of the 2000s. So what began as this chaotic scene that you already talked about, which turned into something much better organized and much more capitalist in a way. And so I would like you to talk about that, about how market has evolved and how the tightening of state control once again, and especially since Russia's large scale invasion of Ukraine. How did that affect the book market, the cultural market, if you like, what is happening to the literary scene these days?

[Bradley Gorski]

Yeah, this is a really interesting question.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Because it gets to kind of the heart of the natural tendencies of capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski]

And how they are different in this sort of very specific post Soviet moment.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So there's this great book by Den.

[Bradley Gorski]

Sin that is about the consolidation of American publishing from 1970s to 2000s. And there he goes into more detail about kind of like how the publishing industry in America consolidated.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But in short, publishing industry is, as an industry, precarious.

[Bradley Gorski]

And the incentives of finance capitalism encourage mergers and acquisitions. Right. Finance capitalism is any type of capitalism that sees its kind of primary responsibility as return on investment to shareholders. Right. And mergers and acquisitions are always an easy way to goose stock prices.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So under capitalism in the US, under.

[Bradley Gorski]

The 30 years in that book.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

The.

[Bradley Gorski]

Publishing industry becomes much more compressed, much more consolidated. This happens even more quickly in Russia.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Because of those same tendencies and because.

[Bradley Gorski]

Of those same incentive structures, but also even more quickly for a few reasons. First, because of this sort of like inexperience of a lot of the people running these publishing houses. So we talked a little bit about the Northwest publishing house in St. Petersburg.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Sevar El Zapad, that Just kind of.

[Bradley Gorski]

Made a ton of money and ran out of it very quickly. This happened to a lot of publishing houses. So this ferment of thousands of publishing houses was always being born and dying on a very quick time scale. But even more serious outfits like Vagrius for instance, which was this sort of like center of intellectual publishing throughout much of the 90s, perhaps the most prestigious house of the early post Soviet years.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

It fell into hard times as the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Book market contracted in 2000s and it was eventually bought by Exmo and then Aste and Aste and Exmo then merged in 2012 to become basically a monopoly.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So this sort of like inexperience and.

[Bradley Gorski]

Instability of these houses, which have, even the most prestigious of them have not been around as long as Random House or Penguin or any of the big names that you can think of. Anglophone publishing. But the second reason is the state. So antitrust legislation or litigation, sorry, which.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

Is often unsuccessful in the Anglophone world at stopping mergers, nevertheless slows the whole process down.

[Bradley Gorski]

Every sort of large acquisition needs approval. There's a lot of litigation that goes around that there was very little antitrust state apparatus throughout the 1990s. So these acquisitions come very quickly if the smaller houses don't just entirely die.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And by the mid-2000s, the state or.

[Bradley Gorski]

State adjacent entities such as Gazprom Media holding, they become major investors in these houses that would eventually hold the duopoly and then the monopoly. So the state becomes involved not only by having a hands off approach to this wild 90s capitalism, but then becoming investors in some of the biggest houses that end up being monopolies.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And so by 2012 you have basically.

[Bradley Gorski]

A monopoly of trade publishing. So IST Exmo, which is now one publisher, owns more than half of the book publishing market today in Russia. And the second biggest publisher is the textbook publisher Presbychenya. So it's not really even operating in the same market. It's also largely state controlled. And so if you're looking at literature, basically all literature, fiction, nonfiction, is published through this one state adjacent monopoly.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And what that that is, what's really interesting about that, I think to me is that this comes about largely through.

[Bradley Gorski]

The sort of natural mechanisms of capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

But then when you get a increasingly.

[Bradley Gorski]

Authoritarian state, as you do after 2012, which coincidentally is both the beginning of Putin's crackdown in his third term on things like international NGOs and LGBTQ expression, it is also coincidentally the date of the monopoly merger between ASTE and Exmo. And when there's a full scale invasion in 2022. And you need to take undesirable authors off the market because they are no longer to be sold. In Russia, it is very convenient to have a single monolithic monopoly that controls not only all publishing, but controls a lot of the retail outlets.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So it owns a lot of the.

[Bradley Gorski]

Bookstores, it controls a lot of the distribution networks, including online bookstores like Azone, also owned by Aste Exmo.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

So you get this, this, this huge.

[Bradley Gorski]

Monolithic company which comes out of wild capitalism, kind of unconstrained capitalism, but ends up being an extremely useful tool for an authoritarian state.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And in this sense, we get this.

[Bradley Gorski]

New collaboration, this new symbiosis between state control, state power and capitalism.

[Bradley Gorski (continued or interviewer)]

And it's worth remembering that this is.

[Bradley Gorski]

Precisely the outcome that was promised to be avoided at the end of the Soviet Union. Right. Capitalism, free market capitalism, should not be compatible with authoritarianism. And in fact, if we free markets and we make sure that there is competition and that people are allowed to buy and sell on this free marketplace, including in publishing, then we will in some way free the people from the possibility of such authoritarian encroachments. And it's only, you know, 30 years later and we see that in fact, authoritarian governments have no problem creating a symbiotic relationship with capitalism in exactly the way it developed in these states.

[Maria Lipman]

Right. Well, thank you, Bradley, for this conversation and congratulations on your wonderful book that I enjoyed a great deal and I'm sure your readers will enjoy it too. Thank you.

[Bradley Gorski]

Thank you so much.

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