In my final column this year it would be natural to look back and do a round-up of the most interesting events in the Russian literature that took place in 2007. Frankly, this hasn't been a very interesting year when it comes to books and literature.
The country's "hottest" fiction authors of the last decade or so, such as Viktor Pelevin or Vladimir Sorokin, have not presented anything new. Meanwhile, in their absence, no fiction book written by anyone else has become a major event, signifying a breakthrough for the author.
Overall, there seems to be a trend to publish less fiction by new and emerging authors, which must have begun a couple years ago and continued into 2007. Publishers of non-commercial fiction have never done much to promote most of their titles, but in a situation when production costs are growing and sales are slow, why at all bother with putting out this stuff, while there are more lucrative opportunities? I don't have figures on the number of fiction titles published this year, or their print runs, but the fact that some well-known publishing companies have dramatically cut back on fiction by domestic authors says a lot.
As fiction is losing ground, publishers compete with each other putting out non-fiction books, often targeting the younger generation of readers with titles focused on music, popular culture and other topics that are expected to be of interest to teenagers. The quality of this wave of non-fiction is uneven, and what readers sometimes get buying a book is a bunch of stuff downloaded off the Web and taken from newspapers and magazines and compiled together.
Among the year's sad events was the death of Ilya Kormiltsev, the lyricist for the 1980s rock band Nautilus Pompilius and, more recently, editor in chief of the publishing house Ultra Kultura, which focused on putting out alternative and non-conventional stuff, often coming under scrutiny on the part of drug enforcement agencies and other state institutions.
The closure of Ultra Kultura almost coincided with Kormiltsev's death, but there were more reasons for its going out of business than the death of the chief editor. Publishing culturally subversive and provocative books in today's Russia has become a dangerous task, and there are few willing to take Ultra Kultura's niche. A new publisher called Kislorod has voiced its plans to work in the same area, but there is still a long way for it to go, both in the number and quality of titles.
Some observers said that some titles that were aggressively promoted this year had backing from the authorities. This is one of those statements that are difficult to comment on without knowing the details. On the one hand, it's not that difficult to interpret the new, two-part book of last year's sales champion Sergei Minayev, Media Sapiens, as a blow to political parties and movements opposing the Kremlin, but proving that authorities could have orchestrated that could be almost impos-sible, and the author's stance could have just coincided with that of authorities.
The same applies to books like Gastarbeiter by Eduard Bagirov or Neft (Oil) by Marina Yudenich, which some critics believed to be "ordered" by the Kremlin. What was more noticeable was a huge advertising campaign for both books, written by virtually unknown authors, including billboard ads in the center of the capital, which must have been quite expensive.
To me this is, primarily, not a sign of political involvement, but another sad proof of the fact that just about any book could be made a bestseller by an active - and expensive - advertising campaign, and the quality of the book itself is irrelevant.
By Vladimir Kozlov
