New Russia - a place of flux

The Russian literary canon, which produced such greats as L.Tolstoy and F.Dostoevsky, has also been revived. A host of young writers have “come out” since the 1990s, who already form a “second generation” (born in the 1960s) in relation to the “early” perestroika writers (the so-called 40-year-olds of the 1980s). These new writers are innovative in terms not only of the Russian literary tradition; they bring a “new word” to the fare of world literature.

Many works are waiting to be aired in the world’s reading forum but to get there, they need to be translated.

As a nascent capitalist economy, “new” Russia has embraced the “brand” as its new marketing tool. This applies to its re-vamped AEROFLOT fleet (for which every air disaster is not perceived so much as a human loss but as damage to the brand) as well as its cultural production.

“New Russian” mass culture, embodied in post-Soviet cinema and the detective genre, mirrors analogous postmodern cultural practices in the global community into which “new Russia” is progressively integrating.

While the “new Russian” consumer of popular culture is still somewhat conservative and does not welcome all “brands” - Zurab Tsereteli’s monument to Peter the Great in central Moscow, on the river, and Vladimir Sorokin’s opera Rosenthal’s Children gave rise to public protests - the sales of Sorokin’s books soared after the “scandal” with his opera, while Tsereteli continues to enjoy the patronage of the Mayor of Moscow and big finance.

All of this testifies to the allure of the “brand” as fodder for the “new Russian” consumer culture, subject only to the powers of spectacle and seduction. In this, the “new” Russian culture mirrors that of the advanced Western democracies with which it is vying, successfully in many fields, despite a belated start in the 20th century.