Cultural Capitalism explores Russian literature's eager embrace of capitalism in the post-Soviet era. When the Soviet Union fell, books were suddenly bought and sold as commodities. Russia's first bestseller lists brought attention and prestige. Even literary prizes turned to the market for legitimacy. The rise of capitalism entirely transformed both the economics and the aesthetics of Russian literature. By reconstructing the market's influence on everything from late-Soviet paper shortages to the prose of neoimperialism, Cultural Capitalism reveals Russian literature's exuberant hopes for and deep disappointments in capitalism. Only a free market, it was hoped, could cure endemic book deficits and liberate literature from ideological constraints. But as the market came to dominate literature, it imposed an ideology of its own, one that directed literary development for decades. Through archival research, original interviews, and provocative readings of literary texts, Bradley A. Gorski immerses the reader in both the economic and aesthetic worlds of post-Soviet Russian literature to reveal a cultural logic dominated by capitalism. The Russian 1990s and early 2000s saw markets introduced, adopted, and debated at an accelerated pace, all against the backdrop of a socialist past, staging the polemics between capitalism and culture in high drama and sharp relief. But the market forces at the center of the post-Soviet transition are fundamental to cultural trends worldwide. By revealing the complexities of Russia's story, Cultural Capitalism mounts a critique that cuts across national borders and provides a new way of seeing culture in the post-1989 era worldwide. Gorski, a literary and culture scholar, examines the breakneck commercialization of book publishing, and Russian literature more broadly, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. ― Foreign Affairs Cultural Capitalism is an exciting study and an attractive book object. Dozens of illustrations accompany Gorski's argument, from chapter 1 through the epilogue―not to mention the "Bestseller"- related appendix. It should be read carefully by specialists in post-socialist literature, as well as a broader scholarly audience invested in better understanding the relationship between literature and modern capitalism. ― The Russian Review Cultural Capitalism includes vivid and compact profiles of the most successful post-Soviet authors―Pelevin, Sorokin, Akunin, Slavnikova, Ulitskaya, Polozkova, even Prilepin, the leading figure of the pro-Putin ultranationalist cultural establishment. Each of these writers manifests a unique and yet adaptable strategy of market success; each of them, more or less unwittingly, creates their own image of neoliberal capitalism and allegorizes the proverbial "path of success" in their writing. The cultural logic that Gorski reveals, unfortunately, also shows that the birth of ultra-nationalism out of neoliberalism is not an aberration―but one of its evolutionary scenarios. Luckily, not the only one. -- Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University Bradley A. Gorski is Assistant Professor of Post-Soviet Literature and Culture at Georgetown University. He is coeditor of Red Migrations . His writing has appeared in World Literature Today , Public Books , the Times Literary Supplement , and elsewhere.