Discussion: The Culture of Reading in the Late Soviet Period: What and How Russians Read in the 1980s

Date

20 MAY 2018

Schedule

16:00–17:30

Place

Garage Auditorium

DESCRIPTION

Today almost any book can be found in a bookshop or downloaded via the Internet. Thirty years ago the situation was totally different.

During the USSR’s waning years, its book market was undergoing unique transitions: a lot of tabooed authors of the Silver Age, previously censored by the state, including Andrey Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Boris Pilnyak among many others, were published for the first time, along with some books from the Stalin era, that had been lying as unprinted manuscripts for decades. Parallel to that, a lot of foreign books were translated into Russian. The changes in the book market, however, coincided with the fundamental transitions in society meaning that a lot of them remained unnoticed. The Soviet Union broke down, and a new canon was being formed. We will discuss this groundbreaking episode for the culture of reading in the late Soviet and early Post-Soviet times together with Anna Narinskaya and Gleb Morev.

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Anna Narinskaya is a literary critic, cultural activist, literary observer of Kommersant-Weekend. Graduate of the Philological Faulty of the Lomonosov Moscow State University, she has worked as a street cleaner in Moscow, a bartender in New York, a TV producer at the BBC, and a special reporter at Kommersant. Narinskaya currently organizers exhibitions and writes for the Novaya Gazeta and Republic. Author of the book Ne Zyablik. Rasskaz o sebe v zametkah I dopolneniyah (2016, Corpus).


Gleb Morev is a literary historian, journalist, editor-in-chief of the Literature section of Colta.ru. Graduate of the Philosophy Faculty of the Tartu University (Russian language and literature). At various times, Morev has worked as editor at the SÉANCE and Novaya Russkaay Kniga (New Russian Book) magazines and was chief editor of the Media section of OpenSpace.ru. Author of publications on Russian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.


Artyom Novichenkov is a writer, literary historian, teacher of literature, and curator of the Book Pavilion at VDNKh.

HOW TO TAKE PART

Free admission with advance registration

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