The end of socialism, as Bradley Gorski’s Cultural Capitalism eloquently argues, engendered tectonic shifts within the literary-cultural landscape in Russia, changes that Viktor Pelevin’s Generation P justifiably portrays in an apocalyptic key as the end of eternity. What in Soviet times would have been perceived as an oxymoron (culture and capital) quickly became reality after 1991 as authors, publishers and critics struggled to reimagine literature under the new conditions of cultural capitalism. Gorski’s monograph brings the issue into focus using a hybrid methodology based on “thick descriptions” of cultural context knitted together with close readings of authors Viktor Pelevin, Boris Akunin, and Olga Slavnikova, among others. The period following the demise of the USSR saw the appearance of market categories, such as the western bestseller alongside literary prizes and institutions meant to counter the commodification of literature. The result was a wholesale refashioning of belles-lettres in the spirit “market freedoms” throughout the 1990s and 2000s, which, however, ultimately enabled the state recapture of it by the late Putin era. In Ch. 1 Gorski traces the “material formation” (61) of post-Soviet literary networks that favored the bestseller, as evidenced by the commercial detective fictions of Viktor Dotsenko or Alexandra Marinina, even as they produced the stinging critique of consumer capitalism as simulacrum in the works of Pelevin. Just as post-Soviet society was understandably animated by visions of material success, so authors of the 1990s developed models of creative success that mirrored these. As Gorski notes (Ch. 2), Marinina and Akunin/Chkhartishvili project an image of authorship capable of mending the disjuncture between commercialized mass culture and its intelligentsia equivalent, allowing highbrow literature to productively—but also profitably—accommodate entertainment fare.

By contrast, Viktor Pelevin’s Generation P presents a darker version of the post-Soviet as spiritual eclipse. The author’s attempt to spin this positively with Tatarsky becoming a “sage of capitalist postmodernism” (86) seems rather far-fetched and ignores the work’s well-documented apocalypticism. In Ch. 3 Gorski demonstrates how post-Soviet literary prizes such as the Booker endeavored to create a capitalist prize culture anchored in transparency and meritocracy, ultimately generating a distinct “Booker style” exemplified by the later prose of Olga Slavnikova. Attempts to forge a non-commercial elite alternative (the Triumf prize) which substituted “institutional solidity” (108) and elite affiliations for the more flamboyant culture of the Booker or the later National Bestseller were mostly overshadowed. By contrast, the 2000s saw the rise of the Big Book, a prize marking the reentry of state power into the realm of cultural politics. Chapter 4 looks at the work of two prominent post-Soviet authors, Vladimir Sorokin and Liudmila Ulitskaia, demonstrating how the utopian promise of a freely circulating world literature nevertheless failed to coalesce, producing an east-west relationship reminiscent of the Cold War.

Thus, Sorokin’s career as underground author begins in the long tradition of “offshoring” Russian literature in the guise of tamizdat. Just as Sorokin’s early works achieved notoriety in the west due to their proscription in the east, in the late post-Soviet period an analogous dynamic of “negative dependency” (2), censure at home stimulating circulation abroad, quickly re-emerged. This begins with The Blue Fat (1999), which Gorski describes as an examination of cultural capitalism from within, becoming more pronounced in later works like Day of the Oprichnik (2006). The situation was different with Liudmila Ulitskaia, who began publishing in post-Soviet times. Still, as Gorski notes, in such works as Sonechka (1992), Medea and her Children (1996), or The Funeral Party (1997), the author recreates the atmosphere of the Cold War, evoking the perceived intellectual and moral clarity of the late Soviet period. In Ch. 5 Gorski looks at how younger authors like Vera Polozkova, Zakhar Prilepin, and Alexei Ivanov achieved celebrity by cultivating activist readerships at the margins of literature using the internet and social media. Evolving from “paraliterary” to literary, the work of these authors, each in its own way, opened new avenues for literary identification.

Cultural Capitalism represents a milestone in our understanding of how neoliberalism transformed the literary-cultural landscape of Russia after 1991. Its great merit lies in the ontological flatness of its approach, treating economic and material-technological conditions alongside authors, readers, critics, and prize culture as co-extensive in producing the literary landscape. The book will be important for those studying post-Soviet Russian literature, but also to anyone interested in the interweavings of neoliberal capitalism and culture.