Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Besides being an accomplished writer of fiction, Tatyana Tolstaya co-hosted the popular
TV talk show The School for Scandal. Her son is the founder and owner of Art Lebedev
Cafe Studio in Presnya.
Contemporary Literature
Russia's contemporary literary scene is largely based in Moscow and, to some degree,
abroad, as émigré writers continue to be inspired and disheartened by their motherland.
Check out what your neighbour is reading as she rides the metro: more than likely, it's a
celebrity rag or a murder mystery. Action-packed thrillers and detective stories have become
wildly popular in the 21st century, with Polina Dashkova, Darya Dontsova, Alexandra Mar-
inina and Boris Akunin ranking among the best-selling and most widely translated authors.
The Winter Queen,
by Akunin, is just one in the series of popular detective novels featuring
the foppish Erast Fandorin as a member of the 19th-century Moscow police force. Several
of these are now being made into movies.
Realist writers such Ludmilla Petrushevskaya engage readers with their moving portraits
of everyday people living their everyday lives. Tatyana Tolstaya has been celebrated for her
collection of short stories
On the Golden Porch
. Her lesser-known novel
The Slynx
is set in
a post-nuclear-war Moscow that seems strangely similar to Moscow in the 1990s. In this
dystopia, an uneducated scribe learns enough history to start his own revolution.
Multiple award-winning author Mikhail Shishkin is not bound by traditional literary
devices. According to
The Economist
, his novel
Taking of Izmael
'has no plot, no chapters
and no characters…' yet it won the Booker Prize in 2001. His 2014 novel,
The Light & the
Dark
, is a letter-book, comprised of the intimate correspondence between two lovers who
are separated by thousands of miles but also by centuries.
Meanwhile, social critics continue the Soviet literary tradition of using dark humour and
fantastical storylines to provide scathing social commentary. In
Homo Zapiens,
Viktor Pele-
vin tells the tale of a literature student who takes a job as a copywriter for New Russian
gangsters, offering a darkly comic commentary on contemporary Russia. Pelevin won the
1993 Russian 'Little Booker' Prize for short stories.
Russian Beauty,
by Viktor Erofeyev, is
the tale of a wily beauty from the provinces who sleeps her way to the top of the Moscow
social scene. She finds herself pregnant just about the same time she finds God. Caustically
funny and overtly bawdy, this best seller in Russia has been translated into 27 languages.
Day of the Oprichnik,
by Vladimir Sorokin, describes Russia in the year 2028 as a national-
ist country ruled with an iron fist that has shut itself off from the West by building a wall.
