10 most IMPORTANT contemporary Russian writers

Alexandra Guzeva

Sep 19 2023

10 most IMPORTANT contemporary Russian writers — Russia Beyond (Photo: Vladimir Pesnya, Vitaly Belousov/Sputnik; Gezett/ullstein bild; Getty Images)

These great talents have already left a powerful artistic legacy that transcends any socio-political viewpoints and debates.

1. Alexei Ivanov

An original writer from the Urals, Alexei Ivanov stands apart from the crowd and aloof from the capital's literary scene: His works seem not to belong to the mainstream literary agenda. Every new novel of his is incredibly atmospheric and cinematic – and Ivanov's books have already been widely adapted for the screen.

The range of topics, genres and historical periods embraced by the author is very impressive:

'The Geographer Drank His Globe Away' – a novel about school pupils going on an adventurous river trip.
'The Heart of Parma' – about a princess in Ancient Russia fighting the indigenous peoples of Siberia.
'Nenastye' (‘Bad Weather’) – about an Afghan War veteran who is trying to discover himself in the freewheeling 1990s.
'Tobol' – about the construction of the first stone kremlin in Siberia.
'The Food Block' – a supernatural fantasy about a Soviet Young Pioneer camp where vampires live.

One of Ivanov's significant characteristics is his reverential and painstaking honing of language and careful stylization to suit a particular era. If, for instance, he is writing a book about medieval Siberian tribes, he is certain to use the vocabulary of these ethnic groups in abundance.

2. Alexey Salnikov

Alexey Salnikov is often described as the main literary discovery of the 2010s. His book 'The Petrovs In and Around the Flu', which came out in 2016, made the writer and poet from the Urals famous. In the novel, all the members of an ordinary provincial family suddenly come down with flu just before New Year and, in their flu-induced delirium, they begin to hallucinate with memories of the past that seem to break the boundaries of space and time.

The novel became a bestseller and critics said that Salnikov would have been applauded by Nikolai Gogol and Mikhail Bulgakov for the freshness of his language and his perspective on literature.

In 2021, Kirill Serebrennikov's screen adaptation of the book was successfully premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. However, Salnikov's other novels also deserve attention.

In 'Oposredovanno' (‘Indirectly’), poetry is presented as a real addiction.
'Okkulttreger' is a fantasy that unfolds in a remote location where human-like demons operate.
And, in the wake of 'The Department', a black comedy about a Urals policeman, Salnikov's works began to be compared to Aleksei Balabanov's films.

3. Boris Akunin*

An expert on Japan, Grigori Chkhartishvili* (*recognized in Russia as terrorist and extremist) is the author of numerous translations of Japanese literature, as well as an ambitious multivolume work titled: 'History of the Russian State', in which he tries to separate the facts from the ideological interpretations of historians of the past.

But, the author is best known under the pen name of Boris Akunin, since it was Akunin who gave his readers Russia’s most famous sleuth, Erast Fandorin. In a series of about 20 detective stories, the charming aristocrat of the late 19th/early 20th centuries, rescues a beautiful lady one moment and the whole of Russia the next. The series should, of course, be read in full, but the standout novels in it are:

'The Turkish Gambit' – a spy novel, which was turned into a movie, about a young girl who follows her fiancé to the Russo-Turkish war.
'He Lover of Death', with its very vivid descriptions of the lives of street urchins and gang members in the crime-ridden Moscow district of Khitrovka.
'The Diamond Chariot', the plot of which unfolds in Japan.

4. Victor Pelevin

Victor Pelevin is considered by many to be the most enigmatic of Russian writers – whom no one has seen in person for twenty years. Yet, every year, he emails his publisher a new novel and, every fall, critics and his many admirers debate whether he is brilliant or just mediocre. Every new book invariably satirizes modern realities, be it the iPhone, Covid masks or feminism and, without fail, contains elements of dystopia. Suffice it to look at the title of his latest novel: 'KGBT+'.

The 1990s, when his main works were written, brought Pelevin considerable fame:

’Omon Ra' – a dystopia about a Soviet boy who dreams of becoming a cosmonaut and about the absurdity of the Soviet way of life.
'Buddha's Little Finger' (aka 'Chapayev and Void' or 'Clay Machine Gun') – the first Russian "Zen Buddhist" novel – a mixture of absurdity, banality and irony, set during the Civil War and in mid-1990s post-perestroika Russia.
'Generation P' – a cult bestseller in which a graduate of the Moscow Literature Institute finds himself in the world of advertising, money, crime and sex.

5. Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin is a major Russian author, who started out as a member of the Moscow underground scene in the 1980s. According to critics, he “imported” conceptualism and Sots Art to literature from the visual arts. His books are hard-hitting works of satire and dystopia and the prophecies in some of them have come true almost to the letter in a remarkable manner. He often establishes the conventions of a new Middle Ages in his novels, while placing his characters in, for instance, a post-nuclear-war future ('Doctor Garin').

The plots are so provocative and trigger so many people that youth movements even organized burnings of quotations from Sorokin's books. Sorokin later responded with the novel 'Manaraga', in which books are used as fuel for cooks to prepare expensive dishes for rich people.

Other notable works by Sorokin include:

'The Norm' – his debut novel, a complex conceptualist work about the KGB and totalitarianism that was distributed through ‘samizdat’ in the 1980s.
'The Day of the Oprichnik' – a dystopia about the lives of law enforcers set in Russia in 2028.
'Telluria' – a novel that many regard as Sorokin's most important book, a mosaic consisting of 50 novellas about a not-so-distant future, in which Russia disintegrates into principalities and is inhabited by Orthodox Christian Communists.

6. Guzel Yakhina

Guzel Yakhina's debut novel 'Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes' (published in English as 'Zuleikha') was an instant bestseller. Collecting archive material on the deportation of Tatars to Siberia under Stalin, she loosely reworked it as fictional prose, combined with the recollections of her own grandmother. On the one hand, it is a book about terrible persecution, but, on the other, it shows how, even in dreadful circumstances, people can discover themselves, find their path and build a life. A TV show based on the book aired in 2020, but sparked controversy and complaints from representatives of the Muslim community in Tatarstan.

While readers avidly devour Yakhina's cinematic novels (she graduated from the screenwriting faculty of the Moscow Film School), critics chide the author for intentionally exploiting sensitive topics. Yakhina's two subsequent novels also deal with some of the most problematic topics in Soviet history:

'My Children' – about the Volga Germans, the Civil War, famine and deportation.
'Train to Samarkand' – about starving orphaned children evacuated south by train from the Volga region.

7. Eugene Vodolazkin

A Doctor of Philology, pupil of Dmitry Likhachev and an expert on Old Russian literature, Eugene Vodolazkin has become one of the most popular and widely-recognized modern Russian authors. In addition, his novels have been translated into dozens of languages.

The bestseller that brought Vodolazkin considerable fame was the novel titled: 'Laurus', the story of a young man in the Middle Ages, who loses the woman he loves. Unable to cope with his grief, he dedicates his life to service to God and sets out on a kind of spiritual Odyssey across the country. He renounces his own desires, serves others, becomes a holy fool and even cures disease. International critics were unanimous that it was one of the best books about God in recent times.

Vodolazkin's books are all very different and highly original, but they have one factor in common - they all examine the past and the present, as well as issues to do with history and the passage of time. They include:

'Solovyov and Larionov' – a story about a White general and a student researching his biography.
‘The Aviator' – a novel about a prisoner of the Solovki Gulag who is frozen in an experimental laboratory and thawed back to life in the 1990s.
‘A History of the Island’ – a novel stylized as an ancient chronicle.
'Chagin' – a novel about a man who has the remarkable ability to remember everything and forget nothing.

8. Zakhar Prilepin

Zakhar Prilepin today is a politician, public figure and TV presenter, all while being a major writer. In addition, his creative energy bubbles up in song recordings with rap musicians or his work as literary adviser to the Gorky Moscow Art Theater. These days, he increasingly devotes his time to non-fiction and writes biographies of other writers, among other things.

He started out as a member of the ‘OMON’ special police in Ryazan Region and his stories and novels featured "blokish" prose about the lives and mores of ordinary people. Many of them were based on his own biography. Here are some of them:

'The Pathologies' – a novel about the Chechen War, which the author witnessed with his own eyes.
'Sankya' – a novel which earned Prilepin his break into serious literature. It describes the everyday life of a young revolutionary radical. Prilepin himself had been one in the past as a member of Eduard Limonov's National Bolshevik Movement.
The novel 'Sin' – a true-to-life bestseller about an ordinary provincial lad growing up and encountering life.
'The Monastery' – a monumental work about a similar simple lad attempting to survive in the Solovki prison camp in the 1920s.

9. Marina Stepnova

Maria Stepnova grew up in a family of doctors and, when she was just 15, she started working as a hospital nurse in an oncology unit, where she saw "real and terrible human suffering". She subsequently studied translation and literature and, for many years, was the editor of the men's magazine 'XXL'. After it shut down, she started writing books and today she can justly be regarded as a successor to the tradition of the “Great Russian Novel”. The hallmarks of solid classical prose can be observed in many of her works, such as:

The novel 'The Surgeon' – a story, in which she describes her medical experiences and in which two parallel and quirkily linked stories are told about a modern-day plastic surgeon and an 11th century Persian dictator.
'Women of Lazarus' – a critically praised novel, which tells the story of the highly gifted Lazar Lindt through the recollections of three women of different generations whom he loved.
The novel 'The Garden' – a time travel story, which transports the reader to the 19th century with an almost Turgenevan heroine who is highly emancipated and independent.

10. Lyudmila Ulitskaya*

Lyudmila Ulitskaya's* (* recognized in Russia as a foreign agent) method is to observe the lives of several generations of a single family against the backdrop of historical events. She is concerned with the impact that politics and a ruling regime (particularly a totalitarian one) have on human lives. Ulitskaya is a veritable propagandist for humanistic values and love.

The writer has announced that major novels can no longer be expected from her, but her readers are at least hoping for a collection of short stories in the future. In the meantime, they will have to be content with rereading the most important of her previously published novels:

'The Big Green Tent' – a vivid canvas dissecting Soviet society in the 1960s-70s, with dissidents, ‘samizdat’ and the absurdities of the bureaucratic machine that prevented thinking people from getting on with their work and lives.
'Daniel Stein, Interpreter' – a novel based on the true story of a Polish Jew, who served in the Gestapo and rescued people and then became a Catholic priest in Israel. The book is an attempt to reconcile Christianity, Islam and Judaism.
'Jacob's Ladder' – a novel in which Ulitskaya courageously reveals the story of her grandfather, who ended up in the labor camps.

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