Recently, in a small bookshop in Paris (it is, in fact, called La Petite Librairie), I found my way to what was a shockingly wide selection of foreign books in French translation. I browsed through the titles by Spanish and Portuguese language authors, carefully divided in each case between the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas. I quietly laughed to myself when I imagined what my grandfather would make of Greek and Turkish authors sharing the same shelf marked, “La littérature méditerranéenne.”Article continues after advertisement
It was on the next shelf I found la literature russe. This collection was notable because unlike the others it did not contain a single living author: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov were as far as this bookstore shelf was concerned the whole of Russian literature. They were not joined by their descendants. In fact, if you were just to have that shelf in front of you, it would seem like people had ceased to write in Russian altogether after 1989.
This is a problem. Because the fact is that plenty of people have written in Russian since the fall of the Soviet Union and reading their books is one of the best ways to see what has become of Russia in the 21st century, beyond the headlines.
