(This is Part I in a series, check out Part II and Part III)
In the 1990s, Russia's fledgling capitalist book industry decided it desperately needed a bestseller
list, or at least so thought the editors of the industry newspaper Knizhnoe obozrenie (The Book Review).
By November 1993, that newspaper had launched the first bestseller lists in Russian literature. The lists
started as small notices in the bottom corner of page 2, but soon blossomed into full-page features. They
ran throughout the 1990s. (You can read my article on the development of these lists
here.)
Bestsellers of Moscow lists for Aug 16, 1994 on the right,
including (from top) hardcover, softcover and “Intellectual” bestsellers.
The article facing is titled “The Magic of the Bestseller.”
Over the last several years, I've collected a full set of these lists, and with the help of two Georgetown
research assistants, Amelia Benjamin and Nina Armstrong, created a data set based on them. The data set is
open source (you can download it here), but I
wanted to present some of it here. For starters, here's a bar chart race of the bestselling
authors of the first post-Soviet decade:
Bestselling Fiction Authors by Ranked Points*, Nov. 1993–Jun. 1999
* Ranked points assigns points to each author according to rank on the bestseller list. First place earns 10
points, second place 9 points, and so on. This chart aggregates those points over the course of the lists.
As you can see, I added a few annotations to orient you in what was happening. Some might need more explanation.
One perhaps especially: Julia Hillpatrick, an author who never existed, leads the bestseller lists briefly in mid-1994.
Julia Hillpatrick—or more precisely, Джулия Хилпатрик (Dzhuliia Khilpatrik)—was
the penname taken on by a collective of men writing in Minsk who wanted to capitalize on the late-Soviet success of
Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and create their own bestsellers. They did just that with titles such
as Rhett Butler, We'll Call Her Scarlett, and Scarlett's Last Love.
Covers of the bestsellers written by "Julia Hillpatrick" in Minsk in 1994
Hillpatrick is only the most successful of several "literary masks" donned by writer collectives in search of commercial
success. Others include Amanta Santos, a "Mexican" writer who penned the post-Soviet sequel to a novelization of the Mexican
telenovella, Simplemente Maria. The Russian translation of the soap opera was Prosto Mariia, and Amanta Santos's contribution
to the literature was called Prosti, Mariia! (or Forgive me, Maria!), a pun that works only in Russian.
These literary masks populate one particularly strange chapter in a possible story these bestseller lists tell.
That possible story is about translated vs. homegrown bestsellers. The lists begin with names familiar from Western (and especially
Anglo-American) bestseller lists: Stephen King, Michael Crichton, Dean Koontz. (Though a post-Soviet twist put
Jennifer Lynch and Scott Frost at the top with their novelization of the wildly popular Twin Peaks TV show.)
But over the course of the decade Russian bestsellers push out the foreigners. If we look again at the bar chart race
with the translation status of the authors isolated, the trajectory becomes clearer. In this version, the blue bars
represent authors writing in Russian and the yellow bars stand for translated authors:
Bestselling Fiction Authors with Colors indicating Translation Status, Nov. 1993–Jun. 1999
So what is happening here? Russian authors are learning how to make bestsellers, but they're also adapting them
to their readership. Homegrown bestsellers were more popular by the end of the decade and not only because publishers
did not want to pay for translations. They appealed to Russian readers. And they did so through genre innovations.
The next post will take a peek behind the curtain to see what genres
Russians were able to adapt and which remained the province of foreign authors. The third post in this series will
look at another tendency that characterizes the life of these lists: consolidation.
But before diving into these two tendencies, a couple of caveats. First, these posts distill a relatively complex
data set (12,932 unique entries for bestselling books over the course of 8 years) into two legible narratives.
The data, I think, justify these narratives, but they are certainly not the only stories one could tell. For that
reason, we’re making the data open source
in the hopes that others will find new pathways for understanding the interaction between literature and the
capitalist market in post-Soviet Russia.
Second, though this research is based on the first complete set of the Knizhnoe obozrenie bestseller lists,
the lists themselves are incomplete. They began only in late 1993 and petered out in 1999. And they were never more
than “Bestsellers of Moscow.” There are also a few idiosyncrasies to the lists. Sometimes genres were listed, other
times they were left off. The fiction/non-fiction distinction, which had never before been central to Russian
book publishing, underwent a number of name changes over the life of the lists (from “belletristika” and “inaia literatura”
to “khudozhestvennaia literatura” and “drugaia literatura”). I use the English terms “fiction” and “non-fiction”
(without further problematizing them) throughout. With those caveats in place, let's dig in to the data.