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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2020
When the word “bestseller” entered post-Soviet Russia, it was invested with transformational power to remake postsocialist culture according to capitalist models of exchange. From its appearance in the early 1990s to its apotheosis as the name of a new literary prize in 2001, the bestseller demonstrated the active power of cultural categories. It built a data-gathering apparatus around itself, shifted the ways that authors, publishers, and audiences interacted with each other, and even generated new modes of collective creativity specific to capitalist markets for culture. Applying insights from actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, this article focuses on the bestseller, decentering authors and other human agents. The bestseller is shown to be more than a mediator between market forces and other literary actors; it is an active force (a “real object,” in the terms of object-oriented ontology) that plays a central role in the postsocialist formation of “cultural capitalism,” or the system of cultural production and consumption based on market value, fungibility, and exchange.
I would like to thank Katherine Reischl, Erin Huang, Carlotta Chenoweth, Gabriella Safran, and William Nickel for providing early opportunities to present this research. Thanks also to the Open Society Archive in Budapest where original research was conducted and to the Harriman Institute at Columbia University for financial support.
1 The focus on the writer holds not only in works primarily concerned with literary analysis, but also in sociological investigations. See, for instance, Berg, Mikhail, Literaturokratiia. Problema prisvoeniia i pereraspredeleniia vlasti v literature (Moscow, 2000)Google Scholar; Abasheva, Marina, Literatura v poiskakh litsa: russkaia proza v kontse XX veka (Perm, 2001)Google Scholar; Wachtel, Andrew, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago, 2006)Google Scholar. Brigit Menzel’s study of the perestroika years serves as something of an exception, paying closer attention to larger societal changes, though with a focus on literary criticism and mostly limited to the years before the fall of the Soviet Union. See Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte. Die russische Literaturkritik der Perestrojka (Cologne, 2001).
2 This is no less true in my own work (see, for instance, Gorski, “Socialist Realism Inside-Out: Boris Akunin and Mass Literature for the Elite,” in Elena Baraban and Steven Norris, eds., The Akunin Project: Literature, History, and Performative Authorship in Post-Soviet Russia [Toronto, forthcoming, 2021]). This article is not meant to deny the existence of human agency, or authorial initiative. Instead, it is an effort to tell another part of the story, an attempt to adjust the scholarly aperture in such a way as to bring different parts of the picture into focus, never forgetting the existence and influence of human actors, but rather consciously leaving them blurry and in the background.
3 On the Russian situation, see Menzel, Brigit and Lovell, Stephen, eds., Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia: Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective (Munich, 2005)Google Scholar; on changes across Eurasia, see Wachtel, Remaining Relevant; on China, see Kong, Shuyu, Consuming Literature: Bestsellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Palo Alto, 2005)Google Scholar and McGrath, Jason, Post-Socialist Modernity: Chinese Literature, Cinema, and Criticism in the Market Age (Palo Alto, 2008)Google Scholar.
4 The phrase “history without names” comes from Heinrich Wöllflin’s influential Principles of Art History (1915; English trans. by M.D. Hottinger, New York, 1932). Russian critics from Boris Eikhenbaum to the members of the Bakhtin circle found inspiration in the idea. For a recent discussion, see Galin Tihanov, The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond (Palo Alto, 2019), 103–8.
5 Latour, Bruno, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, 2007), 175Google Scholar, and 37–42.
6 Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London, 2018), 43. In Harman’s analysis, OOO objects include—among more thingly objects such as Heidegger’s broken hammer—the American Civil War and the Dutch East India Company (103–34). See also his Immaterialism (Cambridge, Mass., 2016).
7 The aspirational phrase “normal country” (normal΄naia strana), which was pervasive in the 1990s (Nancy Reis, for instance, records 1994 usage in her Russian Talk: Culture and Conversation during Perestroika (Ithaca, 1997), 195), receives perhaps its most sustained treatments after 2000. See Matvei Malyi, Kak sdelat΄ Rossiiu normal΄noi stranoi? (St. Petersburg, 2003); and Andrei Schleifer, A Normal Country: Russia After Communism (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). On imagined western culture as aspirational other throughout the Soviet era, see Eleonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), and Yurchak, Alexei, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, 2006), 158–206Google Scholar.
8 For an earlier and incisive study of the post-Soviet bestseller, see Jeremy Dwyer, “The Knizhnoe obozrenie Bestseller Lists, Russian Reading Habits, and the Development of Russian Literary Culture, 1994–98,” The Russian Review 66, no. 2 (April 2007): 295–315. In contrast to Dwyer’s statistical analysis of the bestsellers that comprise the lists, the present article takes a more qualitative approach that attempts to understand the provenance, power, and influence of the cultural category.
9 The first “Operativnyi slovar΄’” appeared under the banner “by reader request” (“po pros΄be chitatelei”) in the February 1 issue of Knizhnoe obozrenie, no. 5,1991, and promised to reappear every ten issues (no. 15, 25, 35, and 45). A. Shakhmatov, “Operativnyi slovar΄ pod redaktsiei doktora filologicheskikh nauk N.G. Komleva,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, February 1, 1991, 14. Henceforth, Knizhnoe obozrenie is referenced as KO.
10 Neither of the major twentieth-century Russian-language dictionaries, Ushakov and Ozhegov, include an entry for “bestseller.” The Dictionary of Foreign Words (Slovar΄ inostrannykh slov), however, included the word beginning with its seventh edition, in 1979.
11 An analysis of the word’s use in The Literary Gazette (Literaturnaia gazeta), for instance, shows only one use before WWII, six more before Stalin’s death and a slow but steady increase throughout the years of the “Thaw,” coinciding with more discussion of foreign literature in the publication’s pages.
12 The definition appeared in the January 11, 1991 issue of the paper, just before the first “Operational Dictionary,” on February 1. The original Russian definition reads: “БЕСТСЕЛЛЕР [англ. bestseller < best лучший, большой, больше всего + sell продаваться]—в ряде стран, особенно в США и Англии, наиболее ходкая книга, изданная большим тиражом—Словарь иностранных слов. 15-е изд., испр. М. Рус. яз., 1988.” (G. Nezhurin, “Superbestseller-90,” KO, January 11, 1991, 16. All bold, italics, and capitalization in original.)
13 Ibid.
14 This led to a deep disconnect between publishers’ output and reader demand, as Lev Gudkov notes, “approximately 60 percent of all printed materials released in the 1970s and the 1980s was produced for ideological, propaganda, or official purposes and therefore, like most of the output of members of the Union of Soviet Writers, was never read and never requested by customers in stores or patrons of community libraries” (Gudkov, “The Institutional Framework of Reading: Preserving Cultural Discontinuities,” The Russian Social Science Review 45, no. 5 (September–October 2004): 44–65).
15 Throughout the late-Soviet era, The Book Review published each year a list of “100 Best Books” based on a methodology that combined voluntary and unfiltered reader responses with expert curation. Readers were asked to send in “any quantity of NAMES OF ANY BOOKS” (caps in original). A jury would then choose one writer to receive a “readers’ choice” award (Priz chitatel΄skoi simpatii) and two publishers to be honored with “Diplomas of readers’ gratitude” (Diplom chitatel΄skoi priznatel΄nosti). See “100 luchshikh knig 1989 goda,” KO, August 17, 1990, 8–9.
16 A. Shakhmatov, “Mnenie izdatelei,” KO, May 17, 1991, 2.
17 Aleksandr Sudakov and Aleksandr Ostrovskii, Ibid. Such usage was not exclusive to Knizhnoe obozrenie. In the same year, 1991, The Literary Gazette launched a series titled “The LG Library of the Bestseller,” which promised to be “oriented towards those works that have remained on bestseller lists in the west for the last two or three years.” But the series immediately hedged: “Nor will we forget the bestsellers of past years,” and went on to promise James Joyce and Ezra Pound. Other authors mentioned include Jean Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, and Kingsley Amis, as well as some—Johannes Mario Simmel and Arthur Hailey—more often associated with actual bestseller lists. Such equivocation suggests that even as an epithet applied exclusively to western titles, for which a statistical apparatus for verification existed, the term “bestseller” in the early 1990s was significantly detached from its provenance as a statistical indicator.
18 “Izdanie [and later Knigoizdanie] v zerkale statistiki,” first appeared in KO, January 11, 1991, 2; “Piramida izdavaemosti,” appeared two issues later, KO, January 25, 1991, 2; and “Khit-parad izdavaemosti” joined a year later, KO, February 7, 1992, 2.
19 M. Gorbunova and G. Kuz΄minov, “Khit-parad izdavaemosti,” KO, March 15, 1994.
20 “Bestsellery Moskvy,” KO, November 26, 1993, 2.
21 “Bestsellery Moskvy,” KO, March 15, 1994, 2.
22 N. Vysotskaia and A. Kozlovich, “Smert΄ kul΄turnoi knigi? Kruglyi stol LG,” Literaturnaia gazeta, February 26, 1992, 7.
23 S. Spiridonova, “Dvulikii rynok,” interview with Marat Shishigin, KO, June 21, 1991, 3.
24 In The Literary Gazette roundtable mentioned above, Viktor Adamov calls for “clear state policies” without which, “our business in the conditions of a still wild and unformed market is doomed to a very difficult crisis” (Vysotskaia and Kozlovich, “Smert΄ kul΄turnoi knigi”). See also M. Shishigin, “Nuzhna li gosudarstvu kniga?” KO, August 7, 1992, 5; and A. Vetlugin, “Kniga trebuet zashchitu,” KO, December 6, 1991, 2.
25 O.K. “Knigoizdateli zhdut gosudarstvennoi pomoshchi,” Kommersant, no. 107, June 9, 1993, at www.kommersant.ru/doc/50276 (accessed June 24, 2020).
26 A major topic at the Congress in Defense of the Book, wrote one report, was “the pointlessness of the conference” since “the government already knew about all these problems” and everyone knew “nothing would change” (Dar΄ia Cherskaia, “V zashchitu knigi,” KO, June 11, 1993, 2). The Ministry of the Press and Mass Communication did express its support (with no financial assistance) for the conference, and representatives of the Russian Chamber of Books (Rossiiskaia knizhnaia palata) participated in the meeting; however, the resolutions drafted at the end of the congress were never adopted by either the Chamber, the Ministry, or any other government body. See Iuliia Bez″iazychnaia, “Kongress pomozhet reshit΄ problemy knigoizdaniia v Rossii,” Kommersant, no. 90, May 15, 1993, at www.kommersant.ru/doc/47983 (accessed June 24, 2020).
27 “Bestsellery dlia intellektualov,” KO, July 26, 1994, 3. The rubric was launched under the title “Bestsellers for intellectuals,” but was changed to “‘Intellectual’ bestsellers” (“Intellektual΄nye” bestsellery, with the word “intellectual” always in quotes) beginning with the August 16, 1994 issue.
28 Boris Dubin, Lev Gudkov, and Iurii Levada, eds., Obshchestvennyi razlom i rozhdenie novoi sotsiologii: dvadtsat΄ let monitoringa (Moscow, 2008), 5–9.
29 Boris Dubin, “Chto chitaiut rossiane?” KO, March 15, 1994, 26.
30 D. Reifil΄d, “Chto-takoe bestseller?” KO, May 16, 1995, 6, 12; E. Nemirovskii, “Anatomii bestsellera,” KO, August 1, 1995, 6, 23; “Zhizn΄ bestsellera v pis΄makh chitatelei,” KO, November 8, 1994, 6.
31 Reifil΄d, “Chto-takoe bestseller?” 6.
32 “Zhizn΄ bestsellera v pis΄makh chitatelei,” 6.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 200.
36 Ibid., 201.
37 “Zhizn΄ bestsellera v pis΄makh chitatelei,” 6.
38 On Grisham novels, see “Anatomiia bestsellera”; on Gone with the Wind see “Formula uspekha,” KO, July 11, 1995, 6.
39 M. Morozovskii, “Magiia bestsellera: Chto chitaiut segodnia za rubezhom i chto izdaiut u nas,” KO, August 16, 1994, 6.
40 Ibid.
41 Evgenii Nemirovskii, “100 let bestsellera,” KO, November 5, 1993, 3.
42 The first “Formula for Success” appeared in the April 11, 1995 issue of The Book Review, and the rubric would reappear in every issue from 1995 through 1997, continuing sporadically into 1998. The rubric’s Russian name “Formula uspekha” calls to mind the popular 1984 Mark Zakharov film Formula liubvi, in which a magician sets out to find a foolproof way to produce love and thus prove humans’ power against the gods. The dream of the Formula of Success was an equally ambitious demystification intended to derive and reproduce the secret to the bestseller.
43 Successful Russian bestsellers who translated western genre tropes for Russian audiences include Aleksandra Marinina and Viktor Dotsenko, both of whom, and the trends they represent, have been written about relatively widely. See, for instance, Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv,” in Adele Marie Barker, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society Since Gorbachev (Durham, 1999); and Boris Dubin, “The Action Thriller (Boevik) in Contemporary Russia,” in Stephen Lovell and Birgit Menzel, eds., Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia (Munich, 2005).
44 Reifil΄d, “Chto-takoe bestseller.”
45 Ibid.
46 Lev Lobarev, “Kak my pisali bestseller,” Elinor, 2007, at web.archive.org/web/20070325044404/http://elinor.fbit.ru/arxiv/texts/lin20.htm (accessed June 25, 2020); originally printed in Ia molodoi, no. 10 (March) 1995.
47 Elena Fanailova, “Literaturnye redaktory ili literaturnye ‘negry,’” Svoboda.org, September 24, 2006, at www.svoboda.org/amp/265159.html (accessed June 25, 2020).
48 Ibid.
49 Khol΄m van Zaichik, Delo zhadnogo varvara (St. Petersburg, 2000).
50 Alexander Gavrilov, “Sherlok Kholms na ostrove utopii,” Plokhikh liudei net, at orduss.pvost.org/pages/book1.html (accessed June 25, 2020). Gavrilov was likely in on the game; he mentions the actual authors as consultants and even compares the new “translation” to one of the true authors’ latest efforts.
51 Boris Akunin and Artemy Lebedev, Akunin.ru, at www.akunin.ru/main.html (accessed June 29, 2020).
52 Mark Lipovetsky, for instance, lists not only Akunin but also Khol΄m van Zaichik as examples of the “discursive mutations” that characterized the late 1990s. These mutations bring “recognizable discourses” into contact with new forms. But, in Lipovetsky’s analysis, the new forms are not brought into Russian culture by the market, the onset of capitalism, or the bestseller, but by an “involuntary postmodernism” (nevol΄nyi postmodernizm) that characterizes the postsocialist era. See Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul΄ture 1920–2000-kh godov (Moscow, 2008), 722–24.
53 See, for instance, ibid., esp. “Diagnoz: Post-sots,” 720–55; Mikhail Epstein, Alexander Genis, and Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover, eds., Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York, 2015); Boris Groys, The Communist Postscript, trans. Thomas Ford (London, 2009), none of which examine the marketization of culture as a major force in post-Soviet letters, though they do at times treat thematizations of Russia’s new capitalism in fictional works. Exceptions can be found in works dedicated primarily to mass culture, such as Eliot Borenstein, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, 2007), Anthony Olcott, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Way of Russian Crime (Lanham, MD, 2001), and Menzel and Lovell, Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia. These studies pay attention to the cultural phenomena driven by the market, but they do not claim to offer a broader analysis of postsocialist culture at large. Instead, they seem to understand mass culture and high culture as distinct categories, implicitly agreeing with Pierre Bourdieu’s vision of a polarized field of cultural production according to which mass culture (produced in “heteronomy” with the market) has little to do with the art and literature produced at the more rarefied (or “autonomous”) pole of the cultural field; see Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Palo Alto, 1993), 29–73.
54 Alexander Genis’s essay, “Postmodernism and Sots-Realism: From Andrei Sinyavsky to Vladimir Sorokin,” for instance, specifically references Jameson’s seminal 1984 essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” but does not mention the word capitalism or economic shifts more broadly (Epstein, et al., Russian Postmodernism, 261–75). Slobodanka M. Vladiv-Glover’s introduction to the same volume serves as something of an exception, esp. her reading of Vladimir Sorokin’s screenplay for the film 4 (directed by Ilya Khrzhanovsky, 2006) as a parable of “late capitalism” in post-Soviet Russia (10–16).
55 The emphasis on state discourse (and especially propaganda) in discussions of postmodern aesthetics is especially pronounced in discussions of visual art, in particular Sots-Art, but it has often been applied to literature as well. See, for instance, Larissa Rudova, “Paradigms of Postmodernism: Conceptualism and Sots-Art in Contemporary Russian Literature,” Pacific Coast Philology 35, no. 1 (2000): 61–75; for a retrospective look at the post-Soviet era that concentrates on political discourse in cultural production, see Kevin M.F. Platt, “The Post-Soviet is Over: On Reading the Ruins,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 1, no. 1 (2009), at https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/post-soviet-over-reading-ruins (accessed September 8, 2020). On logocentrism, see Lipovetsky, “Mezhdu logotsentrizmom i literaturotsentrizmom” in his Paralogii, 24–33. On the historical record, see Lipovetsky, Mark and Etkind, Alexander, “The Salamander’s Return: The Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel,” Russian Studies in Literature 46, no. 4 (2010): 6–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
56 Pavel Basinskii, “Izvinite, chto bez draki,” Literaturnaia gazeta, May 30–June 5, 2001, 2.
57 Iuzefovich, Leonid, Kniaz΄ vetra: prikliucheniia syshchika Ivana Dmitrievicha Putilina (Moscow, 2001)Google Scholar.
58 Tat΄iana Nabatnikova, “‘Natsional΄nyi bestseller’: Komu? Za chto?” Literaturnaia gazeta, January 10–16, 2001, 9.
59 Ibid.
60 Interview with Alexander Gavrilov, editor-in-chief of The Book Review, Moscow, June 16, 2016.
61 A victim of the 1998 ruble default, The Book Review’s bestseller lists shrank for the first time in the October 6, 1998 edition. Though the newspaper continued to survey fifteen bookstores and 250 newsstands for its flagship bestseller lists, the “Intellectual Bestseller” methodology dropped from five bookstores to two, and down to only one by November 3, 1998. The first two issues of 1999 appeared without bestseller lists entirely, though they re-emerged at several points throughout the first half of the year. The last bestseller list appeared in the June 22, 1999 issue.
62 Other statistical metrics for the publishing industry continued and—in the absence of The Book Review’s bestseller lists—became more important. The Russian Book Chamber (Rossiiskaia knizhnaia palata), for instance, the government body to which publishers must submit copies of all published books, has collected statistics on print runs throughout the post-Soviet era. Though these statistics compile exclusively publication (and not sales) data, they have been at times taken to stand in for consumption statistics. See Dwyer, “The Knizhnoe obozrenie Bestseller Lists,” 299.
63 Alexander Ivanov and Mikhail Kolotin, publishers of Ad Marginem, remember the 2000s as the decade of the bestseller (interview, June 15, 2016, Moscow). Their intuition is borne out by a Google NGrams analysis, at https://tinyurl.com/yy4bl3v9 (accessed June 29, 2020). Market understandings of the literary world became increasingly pervasive over the decade. For instance, in 2002, the radio station Ekho Moskvy launched a long-running show called Knizhnoe kazino, which aired interviews with writers, publishers, and other luminaries of the literary world along with discussions of the economic realities of the book market. The show later developed its own makeshift bestseller lists (“Top-15 knig nedeli,” Knizhnoe kazino, blog peredachi), at echo.msk.ru/blog/casino/1007924-echo/ (accessed June 29, 2020). Afisha’s literary critic, Lev Danilkin, who was among the most prominent voices in the literary world in the 2000s, was particularly fond of market metaphors, often using the word “bestseller” dissociated from statistics to indicate anticipated success. See, for instance, “Obladatel΄ 100,000 evro, golos Dzhoisa, glavnyi bestseller leta, Sav΄iano o Politkovskoi i 100 velikikh knig v zhanre non-fikshn,” Afisha Vozdukh, June 16, 2011, at daily.afisha.ru/archive/vozduh/archive/joyce-murakami-saviano/ (accessed June 29, 2020).
64 Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer.”