Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism by Bradley A.Gorski. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, 2025. 336 pp. $58.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐7979‐4
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: How did the Soviet Union's dissolution, the chaotic introduction of capitalism into Russia, and the subsequent "marketization" of cultural life affect the trajectory of Russian literature in the 1990s and 2000s?Bradley A. Gorski provides answers to this nest of questions in his sophisticated fivechapter study.Understanding "cultural capitalism" as a system in which culture makers are radically dependent upon market forces and relations, Gorski situates post-Soviet Russian literature, with a focus on prose texts and their authors, in a dense social and economic network.His introduction outlines his method: a confident integration of "thick description, flat ontology, and close readings" that "reassembles the literary" in its "dynamic assemblage of literary networks," as opposed to a static field with readymade oppositions between the avant-garde and the commercial, or highbrow and lowbrow writing (pp.17-18).The book's critical dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of literature is especially welcome.Gorski shows how Bourdieu's conceptual apparatus, primarily built upon nineteenth-century French literature, cannot capture the suffusion of a market logic (a heteronomous principle in Bourdieu's terms) throughout post-Soviet Russian literary culture.Capitalism quickly became a Kantian condition of possibility structuring the composition and circulation of literature.Gorski uses Bruno Latour and Clifford Geertz to dynamize Bourdieu's sociology, making it relevant to the topsy-turvy circumstances of post-socialist literary life.Even literary scholars without developed interests in post-Soviet Russian literature would do well to read Gorski's introduction (especially pages 15-26) for its methodological insights.The book's chapters are organized thematically, with a one-word title in the main clause that focalizes a collision point between "the literary" and Russia's new capitalist environment.The five chapters-"Bestseller," "Success," "Prizes," "Circulation," and "Readers"-image a panoramic view of what it meant to be a writer in the Russian literary economy, and secondarily, throughout the Russian-speaking diaspora.Gorski uses (but does not fetishize) quantitative methods in the "Bestseller" chapter; he wisely places tables and graphs of Moscow's bestselling books from the 1990s in an appendix so that his argument does not suffer interruption.The first third of the book features Gorski's readings of a variety of novels-detective, crime, and historical-from Viktor Pelevin to Aleksandra Marinina.Gorski argues that much of this post-Soviet fiction stages a "rapprochement with capitalism," articulated narratively and also in the authors' calculated actions in the accompanying media space (p.91).Even Russian postmodernism, with its penchant for "metagenre" elements, borrowed from capitalist modes of commodification (pp.57-58).The category of the political plays a more prominent role in the later chapters.For instance, by focusing on the international appeal of Vladimir Sorokin's and Ludmila Ulitskaya's work (chapter 4), Gorski illustrates how 700
Source: The Russian Review
DOI: 10.1111/russ.70074
Author: Benjamin Musachio
Institution: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4413177467