Literary history tends to be contingent upon external events. As was the case with most observers, the editors of this valuable survey of Russia’s newest literature were caught by surprise by the dramatic events in 2014. For Evgeny Dobrenko and Mark Lipovetsky, the “neoimperial freeze” that followed the annexation of Crimea ended not only Medvedev’s project of modernization, but also the period of “post-Soviet literature.” The editors stress the importance of these roughly 25 past years when, for the first time in Russian literary history, authors were completely free of “censorship of both the political and moral varieties.”

The contributions in this volume highlight the major trends in Russian literature since 1991. Evgeny Dobrenko distinguishes between three variants of the “recycled soviet past”: he identifies “Sots-Art,” as represented in Vladimir Sorokin’s early novels; “psychedelic realism,” as found in Pavel Peppershtein’s texts; and, finally, “social cynicism,” as it occurs in Mikhail Elizarov’s novels.

Serguei Oushakine addresses the “(post)ideological novel.” Cases in point are Zakhar Prilepin’s Sankya, Iurii Dubov’s A Big Ration, Aleksnadr Prokhanov’s Mr. Hexogen, and Dmitrii Bykov’s ZhD. All these books depict a shallow social reality without positive values. Oushakine states that they lack a convincing aesthetic composition as well as stylistic artistry. And yet, they serve as indicators for the loss of future as experienced by the Russian post-Soviet society.

Kevin Platt analyzes the “historical novel,” focusing on Viktor Astaf΄ev’s The Damned and Slain, Boris Akunin’s State Counsellor, and Aleksei Ivanov’s Gold of the Rebellion. All these texts display a thorough disbelief in the linear advancement of history. The dominant genre models of nation building or social development have lost all credibility. In these novels, history does not develop from a lower to a higher stage, but provides structures that repeat themselves under different guises.

Eliot Borenstein presents the dystopian discourse by way of looking at the work of Liudmilla Petrushevskaia and Tatiana Tolstaia. He finds the most distinctive expression of the post-apocalyptic sense of reality in Dmitrii Glukhovskii’s Metro 2033 novels.

Alexander Etkind introduces the notion of “magical historicism,” which illustrates the Russian proverb of the “unpredictability of Russian history.” The past is constantly reinvented anew, and sophisticated authors like Vladimir Sharov or Vladimir Sorokin play with this phenomenon.

Ilya Kalinin draws attention to the “oil-text” that appeared in recent Russian literature, and points to the symbolic meaning of “petropoetics.” The literary creation can be likened to the extraction of commodities.

Mark Lipovetsky analyzes three “postmodernist” novels by Viktor Pelevin, Sorokin and Dmitrii Prigov. He illustrates the way these texts stage the ideological relativity of various myths, and challenge the traditional aim of an absolute literary truth.

For Helena Goscilo, “trauma” takes center-stage in her contribution. “Trauma” offers a psychoanalytic metaphor for the interpretation of important novels by Liudmila Petrushevskaia, Mikhail Shishkin and Mariam Petrosian. The relationship between narrator and reader can be likened to the talking cure of a traumatized patient.

Marina Balina points to the importance of the (auto)biographical prose. The fragmented experience of living in post-Soviet Russia leads to new literary genres, most notably in the postmodern collage of Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Daniel΄ Shtain.

Catherine Ciepiela, Stephanie Sandler, and Ilya Kukulin describe the recent development in Russian poetry. Ciepiela points to the “underground legacy” by way of exploring the works of Prigov and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko; Sandler analyzes the new subjectivity in poems by Elena Shvarts, Elena Fanailova, and Polina Barskova; Kukulin identifies a middle ground between poetry and prose in the “narrative poetry” by Maria Stepanova, Fedor Svarovskii, Andrei Rodionov, and Stanislav L΄vovskii.

Finally, Boris Wolfson presents the “New Drama,” which may be defined as text with an orientation towards performativity. He analyzes theater pieces by Evgenii Grishkovets, Ivan Vyrypaev and the brothers Presnyakov, and points to the “dynamic of incompleteness and negation” as well as the “denial of closure and reproduction.”

One of the great advantages of this volume is the combination of evaluation and understanding. It was René Wellek who initially pointed to the necessity of passing an aesthetic judgment while interpreting a text. This is even more important in contemporary literature. A firm canon of literature after 1991 has not emerged yet. Therefore, it is imperative—as the contributors to this volume have done—to draw a distinctive line between literature with a primarily societal impact on the one hand, and literature with a prominent aesthetic dimension on the other.

However, there are two problematic aspects in this volume. First, there is no attempt at an inner periodization of what the editors call “post-Soviet literature.” It is obvious that those authors who published works during the 1990s sought to come to terms with the traumas and symbols of the Soviet experience. Around 2000, there was a clear caesura—a new generation of writers criticized what they perceived as “postmodern literary games,” and called for a “new realism.” It would have been desirable to analyze and explain these shifts from a critical point of view.

Secondly, the analytic categories of the single contributions seem to be quite heterogenic. The chapter “Narrating Trauma” refers to psychoanalytical notion, “Petropoetics” to a literary leitmotif, and the “Postmodernist Novel” to a philosophical term. The chapters on “Dystopia” and “Autobiography” represent well-established discursive traditions. The chapters on poetry and drama are defined by literary genres—these interpretations could also have been integrated in the previous chapters that focus on common topics and themes.

Nevertheless, this volume deserves high credit for following the literary evolution in Russia since 1991 closely. It will have its firm place in university courses that deal with contemporary authors, and the establishment of a post-Soviet canon of prose, poetry, and drama.