Tectonic shifts in the cultural world occur slowly, and are difficult to observe in real time. Still, it’s now possible to conclude that the protracted “post-Soviet” period of Russian literature came to an end in about 2018 as books by millennial authors flooded the market. By 2022, when quantity began to give way to quality, it was no longer possible to ignore the growing demand for new Russian books.
The number of new writers on the scene has continued to grow. Dozens of brilliant debuts are published every year, and many authors under the age of thirty-five already have two or three novels to their name. Of course, the older generation of writers is still around, but for the first time in post-Soviet history, they have ceded center stage to the young.
If these changes were nothing more than an injection of fresh blood, they would hardly be worth discussing. But they go far beyond that. Literature is usually born out of some kind of trauma that shapes the writer. That trauma was usually the same for all Russians writing in the twentieth century (and part of the twenty-first century): civil war, collectivization, Stalinist repressions, World War II—the list goes on and on.
To a significant extent, it was the collapse of the Soviet Union that shaped Russia’s post-Soviet generation of writers. These men and women experienced the anxieties of economic collapse and political instability in the 1990s as adults, and they sought to relive the past in their writing to make sense of what had unfolded: how and why it had happened, and where it had left Russia. Works outside this paradigm were generally perceived as lowbrow, superficial, and inferior to contemporary Western literature.
Toward the end of the 2010s, things began to change. A generation of writers unscarred by the collective trauma of the chaotic 1990s appeared on Russia’s literary scene. Their work was largely defined by the era of political stability under President Vladimir Putin, which, while it stifled public life, left plenty of room for private, intimate life, and thus personal trauma.
For some writers, like Timur Valitov, that trauma was a poverty-stricken, provincial childhood. For others, like Oksana Vasyakina or Sergei Davydov, it was being gay in a homophobic society. For Yegana Dzabbarova and Yekaterina Manoilo, the trauma was growing up in a traditional, patriarchal society. For Alla Gorbunova, it was mental illness.
One way or another, personal experiences have been key to shaping this generation of writers, and the result of this diversity has been literary polyphony. Authors write about their personal experiences, and readers sift through the titles on offer for something to which they can relate.
This fascination with the individual rather than the collective has been accompanied by a blossoming interest in the geographic setting. Like characters, settings must be unique and recognizable by their own idiosyncrasies. They must be both concrete and specific, with their own customs, history, mythology, and toponymy.
Post-Soviet prose tended to be set either in the generic “capital” or an equally vague “province.” There were, of course, some books with a local flavor: Alexei Ivanov, for example, wrote about the Urals and western Siberia; Vasily Avchenko explored Russia’s Far East; and Shamil Idiatullin focused on the majority-Muslim republic of Tatarstan. But these were exceptions rather than the rule: notable, but not representative.
These days, however, more and more places across Russia’s vast expanse have been described in novels with an insight that goes far beyond Wikipedia. Islam Khanipayev, for example, writes about the customs and traditions of modern Dagestan, the North Caucasus republic that is, in many respects, a world unto itself.
Natalia Ilishkina was one of the first writers to address the tragic fate of Kalmykia, a historically Buddhist region in southern Russia. Asya Volodina and Sergey Davydov spotlight their native Tolyatti, a city on the Volga; Karina Shainyan and Maria Nyrkova explore Sakhalin, an island in Russia’s Far East; and Svetlana Tyulbasheva set a thriller in Karelia, a republic in northwest Russia on the Finnish border.
All of this suggests that Russia’s literary geography is shifting from one that is rooted in an imperial mindset to something more regional. Districts, municipalities, and small towns are gaining agency, and provincialism is no longer seen as a source of shame, but as a key element of identity.
Another striking feature of contemporary Russian literature is that it is dominated by female voices. This is hardly surprising, given that up to 80 percent of readers in the country are female.
At the same time, writers and readers alike are tired of many traditional elements of the novel, such as plot and character development. Hence the boom in, for example, fictionalized autobiography, a new genre blurring the lines between fiction and fact, author and character.
Diverse in subject, form, and setting, and predominantly female, Russia’s new generation of writers remains virtually untouched by forces of political repression and censorship (young writers without a significant public profile can easily fly under the radar). Today, they are at their creative peak. But that may be about to change.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 did nothing to stop these millennial writers—if anything, it only accelerated their output. Now, however, the war is providing them with the kind of collective trauma they had previously escaped, and which is likely to transform their work, as it did with past generations of Russian writers. Literary polyphony may become monophony.
Then there is the gradual but steady increase in censorship. Having started with prominent writers such as Dmitry Bykov, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Boris Akunin (all of whom have been labeled “foreign agents,” an official status that carries punitive restrictions), the state is gradually turning its gaze to the broader literary world. Writers are no longer only scrutinized just for their publicly voiced opinions, but also for the contents of their books.
In other words, barring sudden and radical political change, the current epoch of Russian literature will soon come to an end. For now, however, it is thriving, and remains as diverse as ever. Against a bleak cultural backdrop, literature provides a glimmer of hope.
