The Knizhnoe obozrenie Bestseller Lists, Russian Reading Habits, and the Development of Russian Literary Culture, 1994‐98

Abstract

T A his article presents a quantitative analysis of the contents of the weekly top ten fiction bestseller lists that appeared in Knizhnoe obozrenie (The Book Review) between 1994 and 1998. Compiled from information provided by Moscow book retailers, the Knizhnoe obozrenie bestseller lists comprise the only available book sales data that was published regularly and spanned any significant part of the first post-Soviet decade. As such, the lists offer a unique insight into how Russian reading habits?as well as wider Russian literary culture?evolved during the crucial period in which the Russian publishing industry was reorienting itself to the market economy. I open the paper with a brief discussion on the changing relationship between readers, the state, and the publishing industry in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, which establishes the historical background for my research. This is followed by an outline of the various attempts made by other institutions and research groups to measure post-Soviet Russian reading habits: attempts that focus on questioning the reader about his or her preferences, rather than examining actual book sales. I then move on to introduce the Knizhnoe obozrenie bestseller lists, their strengths and weaknesses as a guide to the Russian reading public's tastes, and the methodology I employ to analyse them. The central part of the paper comprises the analysis itself, for which the weekly bestseller entries are grouped by year from 1994 to 1998 and then collated by author gender, author nationality, and book genre to examine interactions between these three variables in book buying patterns over time. General findings include that books written by non-Russian authors occupied a majority of bestseller entries in 1994, but that Russian-authored books