Russians Devouring Volumes As Literary Freedom Blossoms

Lena Shklar, ankle-deep in romance novels, frantically searched through the brown paper packages spread out before her. “Number 105 - where is it?” she asked her husband, Vladimir, as a customer peered down his scribbled list of Harlequin paperbacks.

Number 105 popped out of a stack; the customer wanted 10 copies of the steamy 206-page novel “In Name Only,” by Diana Hamilton, translated into Russian and small enough to fit in a pocket. The price: 52 cents each.

The Shklars, trained as engineers, are a family of booksellers in the new Russia. They specialize in all 136 editions of the Harlequin romance novels, as well as children’s books. Four days a week they stand on the concrete floor of the Moscow wholesale book market, which is held in the snaking pedestrian walkways of a giant stadium. Taking up every inch in coat rooms and stairwells, the market is informal, dusty, sweaty, chaotic and, most of all, bustling with buyers.

“I remember how hard it was to get books in the old days. I had to pay scalpers,” said Vladimir, 50, in a quiet moment, as his son Igor helped another customer with a stack of illustrated children’s books. “Now the same book comes out from several publishers; it is prettier and less expensive than before. We meet the demands of the public very fast.”

Despite the hardships of the last five years here - salaries and pensions paid months late, shuttered factories, rampant crime and countless humiliations - Russians have preserved their literary interests and their hunger for books. From subway stations to quiet neighborhood shops, there is a boom in publishing - and buying - books.

The pulp fiction and how-to manuals that dominate the shelves fall well short of the country’s great literary tradition, but the surge of interest is a hopeful sign as Russia struggles through hard times.

The trend represents one of the most obvious benefits of the collapse of authoritarianism and the explosion of free choice. In the Soviet years, few books were available that Russians really wanted to read. Now they are inundated with choices, from lurid detective stories to illustrated encyclopedias, from books about cooking to computers, from biography to three-dimensional holograms that fascinate children.

A recent stroll through Moscow’s bookstores and markets revealed a generous array of titles, including translations of Bill Gates’s “The Road Ahead” and books about sharks, woodcutting and learning English. A memoir by Yegor Gaidar, an economist and former Russian prime minister, lay side by side with books about film star Brigitte Bardot and Stalin henchman Lazar Kaganovich. While Russia’s bookstores cannot match the offerings of mega-stores of the West, the variety of books published here is far greater than before.

Moreover, the boom suggests that the basic behavior of a free market is at work; publishers are rushing into print the books that people say they want to read.

Yevgeny Metyolkin, a part-time wholesale bookseller, recently browsed the shelves at Dom Knigi, or House of Books, one of Moscow’s largest retail bookstores. He pointed to a popular children’s series, “Everything About Everything,” spread out across the racks. The books cost $2 each, and the series runs to 12 volumes. Metyolkin said that from his own table at the market, he sometimes sells two or three complete sets each day.

A science fiction fan, Metyolkin, 43, recalled that he used to buy almost everything of that genre he could get his hands on, especially by foreign authors. But now there is such a wealth of science fiction that he can pick and choose among Russian authors.

“The time has finally come when the publishers put out everything from ‘Mein Kampf’ to the Bible,” he said. “Now we have a choice. Erotic, detective, children’s, financial, economic. Each book finds its customer. There’s now a huge choice.”

Literature holds a special place in Russian culture and history. In a land dominated by autocrats, literature, for more than a century, was at the cutting edge of opposition to power.

In the Soviet years, writers had to cope with censorship and the Communist Party doctrine of socialist realism, which attempted to force writers to celebrate socialism and the party line. Mediocre writers who conformed were rewarded with massive print runs, and those who resisted were not published.

For the reader, the result was mountains of books that no one wanted to read and a trickle of books that were truly in demand. Books by Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, for example, were printed in enormous numbers, but readers stood in line for hours to get a treasured piece of fiction or poetry. Scarce books became valuable.

As the Soviet system cracked, there was a huge outpouring of forbidden literature. But the euphoria has abated. “When books were scarce, people were just anxious to buy books. They thought it was a good investment, a sign of prestige,” said critic and author Sergei Belov. “Now things have changed. People buy books to read them.”

Statistics are hard to find. But a group called the Book Chamber reports that 33,623 titles were published in Russia in 1995, and about 36,000 last year. Many are published in small numbers, and, according to specialists, selling as few as 20,000 copies can make a book a bestseller. The number of books published is far lower than the artificially high production of the Soviet years, but experts say it more closely reflects what Russians want to read.

Books are still remarkably cheap: A new, hardback detective novel costs about $3; a paperback usually less than $1. But book retailing is chaotic, and buyers must often hunt from store to store to find a specific title.

Belov said many books are hastily prepared. “The quality of publishing is rather low,” he said. “Translations are poor, editing is poor, there are misprints, a lot of mistakes. Publishers are always in a hurry; they want to be first.”

The Shklar family, working at the wholesale market, estimated that they sell more than $500 worth of books a day, largely romance novels. “It’s mostly women who read them,” said Vladimir. “It’s relaxing for your mind when you go to the dacha. And the men want detective stories.”

For the current state Russia is in, it’s normal. Maybe in five more years we’ll go back to reading Tolstoy. But these are books you can read and throw away.”