There is a funny story about that fair in Moscow. Its name is Non-Fiction, and today it’s exactly where you may get all the new fiction books and see their authors. The thing is, the trends were telling us, only 4-5 years ago, that the readers were steadily abandoning fiction and all kind of tales, turning to science, and coaching, and history, you name it. So a whole new annual non-fiction book fair in December was added to the traditional and struggling one in early September, with the idea that books of fiction were out of fashion. But they are back now, penetrating heavily even the December gathering.
Now let’s see some figures. You may scoff at the fact of the publishing market getting up by 9.6 per cent in 2023, saying that it’s because the prices went up – and you will be correct. But how about number of titles published or republished going up by 5.1 per cent in the first nine months of this year, with the completely new titles multiplying by 5.9 per cent, comparing with the same period of 2023?
Or how about general circulation of all books going up by 2.5 per cent, with an average circulation, per single book, going down: it obviously means there are more writers around than before, and these are mostly new names, with smaller audiences, so far.
I met my old friend and mentor Mr. Anatoly Korolev at the Non-Fiction, he was the one to prod me again and again to write my first novel in 2006. Anatoly, while going on writing his own books, has kept his position as a teacher at the famous Literature College in Moscow (with graduates mostly becoming editors or taking other publishing positions). Anatoly tells me that there is a tremendous change in his class this year. Young people are enrolling there in flocks, with more green and wild literary talents revealed than ever before.
There is a wonderful story behind all that. It’s a story about a quiet transformation of the whole Russian nation, and that subject has to be interesting enough to everyone. You, I daresay, may possibly have some interest in what kind of new nations the world may encounter after the ongoing changes, these nations being Russian, American, European or Arabic. The world will just have to be different very soon. And one of the best ways to understand these changes is to remember the saying: you are not only what you eat, you also are what you read.
Going back to my first novel (about the spies on the Great Silk Route) published in 2006, I remember well finding myself between two ages of Russian Enlightenment, the Diamond Age that was the 20thcentury, and the vague and uncertain era that followed.
A writer was a national guru and a minor deity in the first case, and a dubious creature in the second. I was basking in the dying fires of traditional veneration of people of letters, but I also knew well that the Russian public was reading less and less of fiction with every passing year, with circulations going down and down. It looked like I was entertaining the audience that was getting older and older, while the new one lost its interest in books altogether.
So what happens now? There is a purely political explanation, which is small wonder, with several political battles going on inside the Russian society. The literary community became too Western and liberal for its own good, says the ultra-patriotic wing of our society. A writer was supposed to produce thick volumes, lamenting the hopeless backwardness of Mother Russia and urging it to become truly Western. And, since the audience of such literature was getting thinner, the same literary community tried to monopolize the book reviews and the prize-giving industry, creating an artificial writing elite. Translations also tended to be political, with heavy emphasis on foreign trash, mostly the novels about childhood traumas and sexual abuse of the minors by all these horrible men.
And all that cultural enterprise crumbled down after the start of the war with NATO in Ukraine, with some of the writers openly siding with the enemy. Nobody is interested in them anymore.
My current publisher, Mr. Leonid Rozhnikov, confirms this diagnosis, saying that his sales are not in any way dependent on reviews or literary prizes. The readers have learned to ignore all that.
The other side of the political debate are the patriots, most of them with war-time experience in Ukraine, more often poets than prose-writers, some wonderful ladies among them. One may predict a new wave of poetry emanating from that tightly-knit circle of military literati. But that trend is only beginning, it’s hard to say whether it has staying power.
So what kind of literature, then, feeds the obvious revival of Russia’s interest to literature? Here we have plenty of opinions of those participating in the Non-Fiction, and in one word it’s about fantasy. Or, to put it better, fairy tales. And, to add, the young public wants a lot of new and young names on their book covers, not associated with old and disgraced writers.
You have to be dreamy and romantic to win the new and avid generation of readers, say the publishers. It may be novels about the times of the old Russian Empire, where great detectives were also magicians. Or it may be “young adult” books with magical animals helping people. And – talking about classics – the absolute winner in sales all over Russia (not Moscow, Moscow is special) is still the greatest book of the 20thcentury, that is Master and Margarita by Michail Bulgakov. That’s an absolutely magical and magic book about the Devil himself visiting Moscow in 1920-s and trying to settle affairs of men and women, forsaken by God.
There are two powerful streams feeding that river of dreams. One is a very separate world of Russia’s fantasy writers. These were the people who shunned the pro-Western community of “real writers’ and lived in their own world, with their own book prizes and festivals. Now they are kings.
And the other stream is Asia. The Russian readers, especially the ones craving for magic dreams, have suddenly discovered Asian fantasy, mostly Korean and Chinese, ancient and modern. The process goes two ways, since more Russian books are being published now if not in Korea, then in China.
First, it’s because Western publishers have shut their doors to Moscow, though even before they were mostly interested in grim novels about yet another bad anti-Western Russian, half-Devil and half-child. So the Asians have simply rushed in the void, left by their Western brothers. And, second, Oriental mysticism has, somehow, coincided with mentality of the new generation of our readers.
To conclude, I still remember my participation in the Delhi book fair, the year was maybe 2011 or so. I have no idea which Russian or Indian books have been marked for translation that year, since I shut myself in the hotel room, writing page after page of a novel about Gandhi and the British secret service people scheming against him.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com