Cultural Capitalism

Cultural Capitalism explores Russian literature's eager embrace of capitalism in the post-Soviet era. When the Soviet Union fell, books were suddenly bought and sold as commodities. Russia's first bestseller lists brought attention and prestige. Even literary prizes turned to the market for legitimacy. The rise of capitalism entirely transformed both the economics and the aesthetics of Russian literature. By reconstructing the market's influence on everything from late-Soviet paper shortages to the prose of neoimperialism, Cultural Capitalism reveals Russian literature's exuberant hopes for and deep disappointments in capitalism. Only a free market, it was hoped, could cure endemic book deficits and liberate literature from ideological constraints. But as the market came to dominate literature, it imposed an ideology of its own, one that directed literary development for decades.

Through archival research, original interviews, and provocative readings of literary texts, Bradley A. Gorski immerses the reader in both the economic and aesthetic worlds of post-Soviet Russian literature to reveal a cultural logic dominated by capitalism. The Russian 1990s and early 2000s saw markets introduced, adopted, and debated at an accelerated pace, all against the backdrop of a socialist past, staging the polemics between capitalism and culture in high drama and sharp relief. But the market forces at the center of the post-Soviet transition are fundamental to cultural trends worldwide. By revealing the complexities of Russia's story, Cultural Capitalism mounts a critique that cuts across national borders and provides a new way of seeing culture in the post-1989 era worldwide.

Bradley A. Gorski is Assistant Professor of Post-Soviet Literature and Culture at Georgetown University. He is coeditor of Red Migrations. His writing has appeared in World Literature Today, Public Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere.

Cultural Capitalism includes vivid and compact profiles of the most successful post-Soviet authors—Pelevin, Sorokin, Akunin, Slavnikova, Ulitskaya, Polozkova, even Prilepin, the leading figure of the pro-Putin ultranationalist cultural establishment. Each of these writers manifests a unique and yet adaptable strategy of market success; each of them, more or less unwittingly, creates their own image of neoliberal capitalism and allegorizes the proverbial "path of success" in their writing. The cultural logic that Gorski reveals, unfortunately, also shows that the birth of ultra-nationalism out of neoliberalism is not an aberration—but one of its evolutionary scenarios. Luckily, not the only one.

Jacob Emery, author of The Vortex That Unites Us:

In this timely, persuasive, and impeccably organized study of Russian literature's transition from the Soviet period to market capitalism, Gorski profiles a logical sequence of developments that shaped post-Soviet literature.

Jenny Kaminer, author of Haunted Dreams:

Bradley A. Gorski expertly guides the reader through the varying stages of cultural capitalism's emergence, rise to preeminence, and ultimate failure to achieve its liberatory aims. The close readings of literary texts are invariably original and insightful, and Gorski beautifully weaves together a multiplicity of sources—literary, theoretical, historical, sociological.

Helena Goscilo, The Ohio State University:

Deftly combining panache and precision, Cultural Capitalism illuminates how the socioeconomic forces unleashed by Russia's transition to market during the volatile 1990s transformed the country's institution of literature. It does so with impressive acuity and rigor in five chapters that analyze, in turn, the bestseller, success, prizes, circulation, and readership—bookended by a finely contextualizing introduction and an epilogue that expands the volume's purview to consider the profound ethical and sociopolitical issues inseparable from "imitative capitalism." An informative appendix of charts and graphs provides invaluable statistics about the decade's most popular authors, mapping their distribution and that of their publishers. Incisiveness and impeccable research render Cultural Capitalism the single most revelatory investigation of a multifaceted, often contradictory phenomenon that has taxed scholars for three decades. That the monograph is written in lucid and supple prose constitutes a welcome bonus.

Serguei Alex. Oushakine, Princeton University:

The collapse of the USSR brought down the political system of socialism, but it also imploded its cultural industry. Gorski's book shows what happened next—during the rapid advance of capitalism in the 1990s-2010s. Using new Russophone literature as its main field of study, Cultural Capitalism shows how the market-driven cultural production emerged out of a stage of chaos and crises. Within a very short period, the field of literature organized itself with the help of new literary hierarchies, systems of awards, criteria of success, and practices of recognition. Gorski offers a historically rich and conceptually novel view of post-Soviet literary field, networks, and artefacts by successfully merging sociology of literature with literary analysis. Effortless and convincing, Cultural Capitalism is a major contribution to the cultural history of postsocialism and a valuable intervention to the global studies of contemporary literature.