Writers of fiction have long ceased to be at the center of public attention even in Russia, which once proudly called itself a literary-centric society. The last author whose work was closely followed both by native intelligentsia and the west was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and even his star was in unstoppable decline by the late 1980s. Solzhenitsyn’s 1994 return from emigration and his unexpected support for Vladimir Putin in the new millennium played hardly any role in mainstream discourses. What a contrast to the 1960s and 1970s when literature was a genuine political battlefield! Aleksandr Prokhanov’s identity was shaped in that period; to him, the devaluation of literati as secular prophets and the disappearance of Russia’s literary-centric society was a genuine catastrophe. Much as Prokhanov tried to maintain a position of moral-political influence similar to that of Solzhenitsyn, he was only able to retain public visibility as the journalistic representative of a marginal group—an exotic voice in the cacophony of the Elˊtsin years and a media personality preaching radical statism in the Putin era. As a writer, Prokhanov’s authority was negligible: the four dozen novels that he churned out with feverish regularity rarely reached more than a few thousand readers, as his name recognition was secured by weekly newspaper columns and provocative television appearances.

To foreign observers, Prokhanov’s oddly oscillating extremism likely appears too outlandish to merit scholarly analysis. Not so to British Slavist Edmund Griffiths. It is one of the indisputable accomplishments of this monograph that Prokhanov is taken seriously both as an opinion maker and as a novelist. The book’s seven chapters dissect the gigantic body of Prokhanov’s textual output with respect to major sources of influence and motif clusters, including imperiality, Stalinism, Eurasianism (especially its economic ideas), and Nikolai Fedorov’s Philosophy of the Common Cause. The result exceeds by far the typical assessment of a contemporary writer’s worldview, presenting a veritable map of ideological trends and fads in a disoriented post-communist society. Griffiths approaches the remarkable—or suspicious—breadth of Prokhanov’s intellectual proclivities with maximum objectivity. While contextualizing his views in the framework of Russian intellectual and media history, the author also makes references to Edmund Burke and John Ruskin, among others, demonstrating that seemingly outlandish ideas often have legitimate parallels in the west.

The book’s chapters are divided into a total of 100 numbered paragraphs marked with a §, with each chapter consisting of roughly ten to twenty paragraphs of one to three pages in length. Despite the relative brevity of these text segments, their insights are profound. The book’s unusual structure increases its readability and clarity, which is important for those unfamiliar with Russian intellectual history.

While the book strives for maximum comprehensiveness, one aspect that is insufficiently analyzed are the Soviet roots of Prokhanov’s esoteric passions; after all, even in its heyday this purportedly rational and science-based society produced its own brands of esotericism—semiofficial, of course, but coming to the surface even in popular science journals whenever there was a chance. Thus, parapsychology and eastern mysticism were accepted by large segments of the Soviet intelligentsia and continued to flourish underground when temporarily repressed. For sure, Prokhanov’s post-Soviet esotericism and mysticism did not emerge from nothing. It was the sudden ideological permissiveness of the 1990s that allowed him to spell out what was whispered about in Soviet kitchens and kuluary. In this context, it would have been rewarding to take a close look at Prokhanov as a Soviet author who began his career with short stories filled with empathy and humanism—it is telling that he was valued and supported by Iurii Trifonov, no less. In the early 1980s, Prokhanov belonged to the “Generation of the 40-year-olds” (pokolenie sorokaletnikh), and his eventual turn toward imperial geopolitics when state foundations began to crumble was treated with mild irony and bewilderment by former friends such as Vladimir Makanin. Perestroika was not immediately rejected by Prokhanov—as a matter of fact, he did believe in a reformable core of socialism. Thus, Griffiths’ almost exclusive focus on Prokhanov’s post-Soviet output deprives his worldview of its evolutionary aspect. Likewise, the issue of Prokhanov’s limited readership would have deserved serious consideration. Despite the fact that his romans à clef are spiced up with political revelations and gossip du jour very few of them became bestsellers.

Griffiths analyzes Prokhanov as a public figure whose fictional and nonfictional texts provide intriguing insights into the tumultuous intellectual and mental state of current Russian society. An exception is Ch. 7, which addresses stylistic peculiarities, whereas the question of Prokhanov’s artistry and repetitive aesthetics generally remains untouched. One of Griffiths’s indubitable strengths, however, is his linguistic attention both to semantic subtleties of Russian terms and nuances of their English equivalents. Hard to explain is the omission of Lev Danilkin’s magisterial tome about Prokhanov (Chelovek s iaitsom, 2007), which is neither discussed nor mentioned in the bibliography. After all, the analysis of a prominent neo-leftist’s fascination with an ultraconservative figure would have further enriched this fine monograph.