What is Russia Reading?

The printed word has long held a special place in Russian life. Russian literature is arguably the richest area of Russian culture. What is more, no other form of expression in Russia has had such a significant impact on political events and social consciousness. But, as Russian Life Executive Editor Mikhail Ivanov found, the upheavals of economic reform are radically changing the place of the printed word in Russian society.

“The ‘world’s best-read nation’ should not turn into a country of soap operas...”

— Valentin Lazutkin, Chairman, Federal Service of TV and Radio.

After years of post-perestroika malaise, Russia seems to once again be enjoying the pleasure of a good read.

According to a recent market survey conducted by the popular national daily, Izvestia, publishing is now the second largest industry in Russia, in terms of gross sales (vodka sales rank first). What is more, the Russian Government’s Center of Economic Analysis has reported that, in the first quarter of 1997, the volume of book and magazine production in Russia grew by 21-29%. This represents the industry’s first growth spurt since the inception of market reforms five years ago, when the impoverished population had to sacrifice its spiritual food for daily bread.

Soviet Publishing:

Beating Every Record

Russians awarded themselves the title of “the world’s best-read nation” back in Soviet times, when books were the only way to satisfy one’s inquisitiveness and curiosity about the external world. Travel abroad was difficult if not impossible. Books and tightly censored TV were one’s only source of knowledge. Yet Russian translations of works by foreign writers were carefully scrutinized for ideological correctness — a standard few modern writers could meet. So it is little wonder that the majority of Russians interested in things foreign got a somewhat narrow view. They perceived France through the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, or the less widely distributed works of Henri Troyat or Francoise Sagan. England was seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde or Arthur Conan Doyle. Mark Twain, o’henry, Jack London and Ernest Hemingway were the guides to America (in the 1980s, William Faulkner, Kurt Vonnegut and Ken Kesey, among others, slipped past the censors).

Of course, any self-respecting member of the intelligentsia would also be well versed in the Russian classics — Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Sholokhov, etc., having read most of them in school.

“Sure, the proletarians and non-intellectuals would soon forget about Pushkin after school, but thanks to our old educational system, chances were high that it would take them a long while to forget it. So, one way or another, all the nation was reading,” said Vladimir Drabkin, a bibliophile who has turned his love for books into a business — he now heads Knizhny Business (Book Business) magazine, a leading source of business information for Russia’s professional publishers.

But the Soviet reading craze, Drabkin said, had some important, democratic roots. “Back then, our literature had a different function from today. It was not only an agreeable pastime, but first and foremost a hidden form of protest against the totalitarian regime. People wanted to let off steam and read semi-forbidden books, or some politically frivolous poetry by liberal poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and then talk about it in the kitchen, finding in his poetry, or in xeroxed samizdat authors, hidden hints or overt criticism which echoed their own feelings toward the Soviet regime (hence Yevtushenko’s famous line — ‘a poet in Russia is more than a poet’). This was their form of protest. Therefore, books by rather daring poets like Yevtushenko or Andrei Voznesensky (printed in runs of 100,000-200,000 copies) were swept from bookshelves in a matter of days.”

Now, it is a very different environment. Protest against the regime, or against anything for that matter, takes place openly, and frequently. Dissidence via literature has evaporated. Literature has become simply a pastime.  And poetry is no longer mainstream — Yevtushenko can only dream of 100,000 print runs; a print run of 5,000 is now considered satisfactory.

Of course, this transition did not come about overnight. The political liberalization set in motion by Gorbachev’s glasnost of the late eighties led to a boom in publishing. Many former samizdat novels and “forbidden fruits” of literature appeared in serial form in thick, monthly literary magazines, then in book form a year or so later. Works like Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Ivan Bunin’s Doom Days all created whirlwinds of public interest when they were first published in Russia in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, as often happens, liberty drifted over into license. The freedom of the late 1980s also saw a flourishing of pirated or xeroxed quick-books. Sex, karate or judo guides printed on newspaper-grade stock were front and center on the new sidewalk book tables. And, as Soviets began to gradually get fed up with politically-oriented writings, the time was ripe for Harold Robbins, Sydney Sheldon, Tom Clancy and others.

Pirated translations were the rule at this time — the newly-hatched private publishers didn’t know, or didn’t care, about copyright issues. In perhaps the most famous case, while an established state publishing house, Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, was negotiating for reprint rights to Scarlett, black marketeers rushed to press with pirated translations. Eight separate, illegal editions of the novel were to appear.

Value for Money?

The Russian book market only began to normalize after the government required publishers to obtain publishing licenses in 1991. The measure (along with growing pressures within the industry) seems to have diminished acts of piracy, while not affecting the growth of publishing houses whatsoever. In the Soviet era, there were about 230 publishing houses in the USSR; now there are some 10,000 registered publishing houses in Russia alone.

Consequently, Russia’s book market today is characterized by increasing diversity, a heightened focus on niche publishing, and a growing role for domestically produced books, vis-à-vis translations of foreign works.

Nowhere is this trend to the domestic more apparent than in the detective genre. Detective novels by Russian authors far outsell those by foreign authors; together, according to Knizhny Business, they claim a whopping 38% of the entire Russian fiction market. Russian mystery writers, like Nikolai Leonov, Danil Koretsky, Eduard Topol, Viktor Pronin and Viktor Dotsenko (the five best-selling authors in 1996), some of them with Interior Ministry of KGB backgrounds, bring a decided Russian flavor to their works, choosing Russian settings over international ones, and filling the pages with gratuitous violence and sex scenes. “This is all pulp fiction, in terms of quality,” said Drabkin, “with only minor deviations.”

Knizhny Business ranked the “science fiction and mysticism” genres second in 1996 market share, with 26% of all fiction sales. Romance novels (which first hit the market just over two years ago) placed third with 17% of the market. While romance novels  tend to run in series and can vary widely from the purely romantic to the erotic, all are categorized by Russians as “love-burgers,” referring to the way the works are stamped out like fast-food. And the biggest sellers here are foreign authors, with Barbara Cartland leading the pack. Indeed, so well do Cartland’s books sell, that streetside booksellers on Moscow’s Kuznetsky Most have given her the endearing nickname, “Baba Katya.”

Finally, children’s books of all types (both fiction and non-fiction) ranked fourth last year amongst all fiction. This after a spectacular boom in 1995, when children’s books led the market. Little that is well done seems to not sell well in this genre, from works based on the writings of Tolstoy to children’s encyclopedias.

On the non-fiction side of the aisle, religion and the occult lead the market with 26% of all sales. Practical, how-to books come in second, with some 18% of the market. Among these, business is the top subject matter, with a wide range of books on tax legislation, finance, bookkeeping and management. Books on health care equal the how-to genre in sales volume, followed by the growing science and educational sector (14%), which has been boosted by the “for dummies” (dlya chainikov) series. Books on housekeeping, gardening and leisure follow with 11% of sales and the arts and leisure genre places last, with just 4% of sales.

Pushkin’s Thinkpad

Meanwhile, the stampede to the market has left the “hard to forget” classics suffering. Nor have new-found freedoms led to a rebirth in Russian literature. A random, non-scientific poll of street vendors by Russian Life confirmed the market sales data offered by Knizhny Business, that, while 50% of book buyers select detective novels, just 3% purchase “classic” novels.

“The new ‘silver age’ of Russian literature has failed to materialize,” Sergei Zalygin, Editor-in-Chief of Novy Mir, Russia’s leading literary magazine, has stated. Instead, he said, Russia has embraced the technological age, “which has only one concern: that demand, demand for material goods first and foremost, grows... Pushkin would not have written his lines had he been sitting in front of a computer...”

Indeed, Zalygin’s Novy Mir is a harbinger for the change on the literary front. Five years ago, Novy Mir had a circulation of 2.75 million. Now it has just 21,000 subscribers. “Our major problems are economic,” Zalygin reported. “A subscription costs R76,000 and rises to R230,000 with delivery” — the equivalent of a monthly pension.

“An ordinary reader simply can’t afford to buy books anymore,” echoed Sergei Kondratov, head of eight-year-old Terra Publishing House, one of Russia’s largest.

The facts of the current socio-economic reality are stark. A recent poll by the Russian Book Institute showed that “poor readers” — those with a yearly income of R2,182,000 ($440) or less (40% of the population) — spend just R500 on books each year, or one-third the cost of a metro ride. The “less-favorite part of the population” (the 20% of Russians who earn up to R5,044,000 per year) — spend just R1,500, about one book a year. Fifteen per cent of the population. the so-called Russian middle class, (up to an income of R135 million per year) spend R23,000 a year, which will buy one good work of modern fiction, three cheap, softcover detective novels or four “love-burgers.” Five percent of those polled earn R235 million and more per year — the ever lambasted “New Russians.” They, apparently, can buy as many books as they want. The question is: do they want to?

Looking on the bright side

Despite such seemingly discouraging statistics, Kondratov is bullish. But, then, he has good reason. In 1996, Terra ranked sixth in sales among the top ten publishing houses, according to a rating published by Knizhny Business. The company published 600 titles in 1996, ranging from modern fiction to reference to classic literature. Yet Kondratov cites reader feedback and a wealth of young readers as even stronger evidence of his company’s health.

“Not that long ago we put a questionnaire in our catalog. It was aimed at getting familiar with our readers... We received 80,000 questionnaires back! ...We found out that the bulk of our readers consist of people who started to collect their personal libraries just five years ago, that they range in age between 28 and 45 years old and that we also can count a lot of school students among our clients.”

Whereas Terra classifies itself as a general, “universalist” publisher, smaller, niche publishers also report some unexpected successes with more “serious” books. Thus, in 1996, Sabachnikov Publishers printed 3,000 copies of Blaise Pascal’s philosophical meditations and, to the astonishment of the publisher, sold out within months. With a wise publishing policy, even in such narrow genre, success can be attained. Thus, Ad Marginum publishing house, whose name speaks for itself, caters to the needs of small but loyal audiences. For instance, Ad Marginum has successfully  published books in philosophy, historical literature and serious fiction with print runs of 1,000 to 5,000 books. Publishing Director Alexander Ivanov said the firm’s books are selling with increased success.

Three books

vs. 14 liters

Such random, creative success stories like Terra, Ad Marginum or even the success of “love-burger” and detective novel publishers, allows one to assess the prospects of the world’s best-read nation with very cautious optimism. This is certainly the tone struck by Ivan Laptev, chairman of the Russian State Committee on the Press. He said that Russia can celebrate its “economic stabilization in publishing and even see certain increases in the number of books published [in 1996].” Yet independent publishing expert Yuri Maysuradze is more sanguine. “Recent years have taught us,” Maysuradze said, “that statistics, for a number of objective reasons, give just ‘relative’ results... all the more so since, in market conditions, everyone has renounced the principle of counting published books, instead looking only at the number of books sold.”

G. Matryukhin, deputy chairman of the Russian Book Chamber offers the interpretation that, while the book market has stabilized, it has done so “on a critically low level.” If, in 1991, Russians purchased some 10.9 books and monographs per capita, in 1995 that index had sunk to 3.2 (equivalent to 1940 levels) and, in 1996, even dropped below 3 books per capita.

If one compares this with the 14 liters of per capita annual hard alcohol consumption, there seems little reason for celebration indeed.

As to the second place status publishing enjoys — behind the alcohol industry, serious experts take this more as a metaphor than a factual conclusion. “To compare two industries like these,” said Knizhny Business’ Drabkin, “one should let the economic experts speak, not the journalists. I respect Izvestia as a newspaper, but the production costs, and therefore the profit margin, in publishing vis-à-vis vodka-making are simply incomparable. Maybe by saying that, as a business, books ranked second after vodka they simply meant that, once the customer has had his shot of vodka, then he is the mood to buy a book? Which may well be, provided he has any money left...”