The Department of German, Russian & East European Languages & Literatures
presents
The Rise and Fall of the Book Market in Post-Soviet Russia
Bradley Gorski (Georgetown)
Tues, 9/30 5:30pm
Comparative Literature Seminar Room (AB West, Room 4052)
Abstract: Capitalist markets rushed into book publishing even before the Soviet Union fell, when market-based reasoning of supply and demand and return on investment influenced publishing decisions starting in the late 1980s. The market promised to liberate literature from Soviet ideological strictures and to bring Russian literature into modern world culture. But by the second post-Soviet decade, Russian literature?s exuberant hopes for the market era had soured. This talk traces the arc of post-Soviet literature by showing how capitalism changed literature and even laid the groundwork for a revived authoritarian culture.
Bio: Bradley A. Gorski is assistant professor of Russian and post-Soviet culture in the Slavic Department at Georgetown University. He has published on Russian bestsellers, late-Soviet hipsters, and the poetics of disgust in Langston Hughes?s work. His writing has appeared in World Literature Today, Public Books, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other publications. He is the co-editor of Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility and Leftist Culture after 1917 (Toronto, 2024) and author of Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism (Cornell, 2025).
This talk is Co-sponsored by The History Department.
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