Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism by Bradley A.Gorski. Ithaca: Northern Illinois University Press, 2025. 336 pp. $58.95. ISBN 978‐1‐5017‐7979‐4

How did the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the chaotic introduction of capitalism into Russia, and the subsequent “marketization” of cultural life affect the trajectory of Russian literature in the 1990s and 2000s? Bradley A. Gorski provides answers to this nest of questions in his sophisticated five-chapter study. Understanding “cultural capitalism” as a system in which culture makers are radically dependent upon market forces and relations, Gorski situates post-Soviet Russian literature, with a focus on prose texts and their authors, in a dense social and economic network. His introduction outlines his method: a confident integration of “thick description, flat ontology, and close readings” that “reassembles the literary” in its “dynamic assemblage of literary networks,” as opposed to a static field with readymade oppositions between the avant-garde and the commercial, or highbrow and lowbrow writing (pp. 17–18). The book’s critical dialogue with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of literature is especially welcome. Gorski shows how Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus, primarily built upon nineteenth-century French literature, cannot capture the suffusion of a market logic (a heteronomous principle in Bourdieu’s terms) throughout post-Soviet Russian literary culture. Capitalism quickly became a Kantian condition of possibility structuring the composition and circulation of literature. Gorski uses Bruno Latour and Clifford Geertz to dynamize Bourdieu’s sociology, making it relevant to the topsy-turvy circumstances of post-socialist literary life. Even literary scholars without developed interests in post-Soviet Russian literature would do well to read Gorski’s introduction (especially pages 15–26) for its methodological insights. The book’s chapters are organized thematically, with a one-word title in the main clause that focalizes a collision point between “the literary” and Russia’s new capitalist environment. The five chapters—“Bestseller,” “Success,” “Prizes,” “Circulation,” and “Readers”—image a panoramic view of what it meant to be a writer in the Russian literary economy, and secondarily, throughout the Russian-speaking diaspora. Gorski uses (but does not fetishize) quantitative methods in the “Bestseller” chapter; he wisely places tables and graphs of Moscow’s bestselling books from the 1990s in an appendix so that his argument does not suffer interruption. The first third of the book features Gorski’s readings of a variety of novels—detective, crime, and historical—from Viktor Pelevin to Aleksandra Marinina. Gorski argues that much of this post-Soviet fiction stages a “rapprochement with capitalism,” articulated narratively and also in the authors’ calculated actions in the accompanying media space (p. 91). Even Russian postmodernism, with its penchant for “metagenre” elements, borrowed from capitalist modes of commodification (pp. 57–58). The category of the political plays a more prominent role in the later chapters. For instance, by focusing on the international appeal of Vladimir Sorokin’s and Ludmila Ulitskaya’s work (chapter 4), Gorski illustrates how “cultural capitalism and political repression formed a symbiotic relationship,” as he moves beyond a purely apolitical “World Literature” model pioneered by Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and David Damrosch, among others (p. 168). Throughout the book, Gorski consistently underlines the extent to which recent Russian literary history has been conditioned by cultural capitalism. In diagnosing this dependent relationship, the author hopes to reveal cultural capitalism’s contingency vis-à-vis literature. The diagnosis—Gorski’s principal contribution—becomes all the more compelling as the argument unfolds. The problem is clear, but are solutions on offer? I am not fully convinced that the poems, essays, and literary installations discussed by Gorski in his epilogue articulate viable “alternative visions” to the reigning “capitalist aesthetics” that Gorski finds lamentable (pp. 223, 226). This connects to a deeper anxiety about literature’s (in)capacity to substantively alter economic and social trajectories. Dogmatic Marxists and Neoliberals alike have traditionally subscribed to literature’s reactive, epiphenomenal relationship to modes of production or economic models that prize exchange value. While reading Cultural Capitalism, I found myself wanting to expand the study’s geographical and chronological purview. This is not a criticism, but a compliment. Gorski clearly and fairly delimits his inquiry, and his overall approach invites extension to cover adjacent literary phenomena. For example, Gorski analyzes the precipitous rise and fall of circulation statistics for Moscow thick journals (such as Novyi mir) in the late 1980s and early 90s (see page 33). How would studying popular perestroika periodicals published outside of Russia, such as the Latvian Avots / Rodnik or Daugava, each with Russian-language versions and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, enrich this discussion? The influx of capitalism, global book markets, and social media enhanced Russian writers’ ability to achieve widespread celebrity. But could the post-Soviet success of Boris Akunin (see pages 72–81) or Vera Polozkova (pages 175–88) have been prefigured by the international fame of Soviet “Sixtiers”? Finally, how would Gorski’s overall argument change if, instead of prose, he had privileged poets as he analyzed their post-Soviet navigation of market pressures alongside a dramatic decline in poetry’s prestige? The book’s epilogue gestures in this direction, with readings of poems by Pavel Arseniev and Kirill Medvedev, but the idea of writing a poetry-centric history along similar methodological lines presents an intriguing direction for future research. 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.