Fresh Page in Russian Literature

Dmitri Lipskerov has come up in the world since seeking his fortune as a writer in Los Angeles three years ago, only to end up delivering pizzas.

After an unsatisfying year as an emigre he returned to Mother Russia, where the 32-year-old playwright has won critical acclaim for his best-selling first novel about real life in a mythical city, “Forty Years of Chanchzhoe.”

Still, he’s a long way from quitting his day job.

In the cold, cruel world of culture in today’s Russia, Lipskerov is unlikely to earn from a literary success more than a token enhancement of his income from a restaurant business.

Russian literature has suffered a fall from grace over the last five years, having lost the state sponsorship that allowed the Kremlin to boast that it ruled over the world’s best-read people.

Although galvanized by the creative and consumptive freedom that now prevails, even the most popular authors must be satisfied with more spiritual than financial reward as book sales continue a post-Communist nose dive.

But writers, editors and critics are far from distressed over the state of literature in the new era.

They cheer the collapse of state support as a small price to pay for the simultaneous departure of censorship, and they predict a new golden age of Russian literature once the smoke of the current social revolution clears.

Big Brother has been sacked as editor. The post-Soviet publishing industry once on death’s doorstep has crawled back to life. And the soulful self-examinations that have distinguished Russia’s best literary artists for centuries are being scratched into notebooks by part-time waiters and sales clerks.

“Sure, I long for the good old days, when writers got fat stipends and apartments and dachas,” Lipskerov says sarcastically, smiling as he sips tea on the plush sofa of a nightclub where he keeps an office. “And am I supposed to also long for the time when I would have had to write about the heroic contributions of toiling miners?”

Even more important than the liberation from state control, say contemporary writers and critics, is the transformation of reading from the escapism it provided from the monotony of Communism to a willful choice of an individual in a society now replete with other entertainment options.

Gone are the times when tens of thousands flocked to Moscow’s Luzhniki stadium for a poetry reading. But budding writers can still be found reciting their works in smoky basement cafes or for patrons of a few new private bookstores.

“In Soviet society, people had plenty of time and practically no other form of amusement. They got used to thinking a good book should be read through in one evening,” says Alexei Kostanyan, chief editor of the Vagrius publishing house that issues some of Russia’s most popular new authors.

“Now, everyone is running around trying to work enough to make ends meet, and when they do have a few free minutes, there are interesting programs on television and videos for rent and books and magazines that don’t demand a lot of brain work.”

Falling Sales

Book sales are difficult to track in the wildcat markets that have sprung up throughout Russia, where efforts to evade taxes often obscure real sales volumes. But the State Publishing Committee reports a continuing free fall in book production, with the 350 million copies to be issued this year a mere 22% of the peak Soviet-era production in 1990 and on a par with book output in 1940.

Circulation of Russia’s once-revered literary magazines has also plummeted. The most popular outlet for new works, Novy Mir, sold 2.5 million copies a month in 1990, compared with today’s 22,000.

Book prices here are low in comparison with Western hardcovers, ranging from $3 to $5 for new titles without special illustrations. But in a country where the average monthly salary is well under $200--at least that’s what they tell the tax collectors--book purchases are luxuries, and libraries are poorly supplied for the same cash-crunch reasons.

Publishing houses in the Soviet era were state-funded and supplied with works exclusively by Glavlit, the omnipotent censorship agency that passed judgment on every word proposed for printing.

Book costs bore no relation to the cost of production, and sales of even the most mediocre literature were often brisk for lack of anything else to entice consumers.

Paperback publishing has mushroomed since Soviet times, when all that was deemed serious literature was issued in hard-bound volumes. But most of the cheap pocket novels for sale at kiosks and sidewalk stands across the country are translated foreign fare that the politically correct refer to as “mass literature” and the more candid dismiss as “trash.”

Detective stories, sci-fi thrillers, romance novels and erotica crowd out quality fiction now as Russians catch on to the more frivolous distractions forbidden them during the dour Communist era.

“I like detective novels. They’re easy to read on the Metro [subway] and they take my mind off my worries,” says Tamara Samukhina, a 40-year-old office worker browsing through the Moscow House of Books, whose shelves of Communist propaganda tomes have been replaced with everything from Ortho gardening manuals to Golden Book children’s tales.

Figures on foreign-versus-domestic fare are hard to come by, as there is no longer a central agency overseeing all publishing houses.

But a browse through the busiest bookstores and curbside markets suggests that domestic works still dominate hardcover offerings, while as much as 90% of paperbacks are translated works from Western countries.

“We didn’t have mass literature before because of censorship. Or perhaps I should say what mass literature we had was so ideological that no one wanted to read it,” says Alexander Kabakov, whose five novels since the advent of glasnost in the late 1980s have won him an appreciative following. “I don’t consider the situation we have today to be a catastrophe or evidence of a loss of intellect. What we have now is completely normal.”

The Soviet regime’s pet writers were physically pampered and spiritually bought off with the comforts of birch-shaded country homes believed to be conducive to genius. Flattering press runs of their conscripted works ran as high as several million, compared with an average of 30,000 for an anticipated bestseller today.

For lack of anything better on the market, the more popular Soviet writers’ works were bought up by the intellectually hungry and bored masses in hopes of mining secret nuggets of insight or subtle criticism.

Window on World

Virtually every family boasted a personal library with hundreds of volumes, the requisite collected works of Soviet founder Vladimir I. Lenin gathering dust among dogeared classics by Russian and ideologically correct Western writers.

“People read a lot before because the world was closed off by the Iron Curtain. Their only window was through literature,” says Viktoria Tokareva, one of the few writers to find success in the Soviet and contemporary eras.

Her short stories about human frailties, misguided romances and battles with the petty bureaucracy, which has also survived the transition unscathed, find broad resonance with readers who like to know that they do not suffer alone.

“I cannot follow fashion. I have to stay true to my own style, which is to write about real life but through the eyes of an incurable romantic,” says the raven-haired grandmother, flitting about the kitchen of her dacha in slippers and bathrobe. “That’s why women like to read my books. They can see themselves in the stories.”

A rarity in her ability to survive on her writing income, Tokareva predicts an eventual easing of Russia’s economic constraints and a corresponding rise in the money people will have to spend on books.

No one is claiming that the current crop of writers filling the limited market for serious literature is of exceptional genius.

However, some expect today’s hardships to inspire a new golden age of Russian writing.

“Great literature has a habit of appearing after times of great tragedy. The Bolshevik Revolution and Stalinist terror produced some of our best writers this century,” says literary critic Lev Anninsky, citing Mikhail Bulgakov, Isaac Babel, Boris Pasternak and the repatriated political exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Russia’s trying journey out of Communist ruin has been no less devastating than its previous tragedies, the critic says, noting the war over Chechnya that has killed tens of thousands and the economic polarization of society between garish wealth and grinding poverty.

“When we overcome this period of crisis, you will see good novels appear, perhaps even great novels, describing the difficult times we are living through now,” says Kostanyan, the publishing house editor. “War and upheaval in Russia always have a way of exaggerating life, of intensifying feelings.”

It took nearly a decade after dictator Josef Stalin’s death in 1953 for the first tentative examinations of that period to make their way into Russian writing during “the Thaw” allowed by late Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev.

Khrushchev’s ouster in 1964 by Leonid I. Brezhnev quashed the literary rebirth and ushered in what is now called “the era of stagnation.”

Expository writings about Stalinism exploded in the late 1980s with the catalyst of glasnost, then-Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of greater openness.

But once spent of the untold tales of the time of terror, Russian writers were temporarily paralyzed by both unfamiliar freedom and the sudden disappearance of state support that followed the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

Creative Jump-Start

Author and critic Stanislav Rassadin credits the emergence of a few insightful young authors and the endowment of a Russian Booker Prize for jump-starting the creative process.

“It has given us a means of recognizing good literature, for the benefit of both writers and readers,” Rassadin says of the contest that will announce this year’s winner in early December. He also praises the death of state awards such as the Communist-era Lenin Prize.

Endowed by the British foundation that sponsors the prestigious international book award of the same name, the Russian Booker bestows $12,500 on the winner and $1,000 to each of five others short-listed--significant sums in struggling Russia.

Having to work to make ends meet, though, is a fact of life for most writers, and one they accept as the way the world turns elsewhere.

“I think there are few writers anywhere able to live entirely off of their literary earnings,” says Kabakov, the popular novelist who works as a full-time editor for the weekly Moscow News. “Even in America, most good writers work as professors of literature in universities. Unfortunately, in Russia, professors earn even less than authors.”

Working in an office, shop or restaurant also keeps a writer in touch with the people he or she is trying to attract as a reader, enhancing the prospects for striking relevant chords with the unhappy masses.

“There’s nothing standing in the way of creativity now,” Lipskerov says. “Now my only enemy is laziness.”