Bradley Gorski’s (Slavic Ph.D. ’18) “Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market after Socialism” was just released by Cornell University Press in its Northern Illinois University Slavic, East European and Eurasian series. It is the newest addition to Studies of the Harriman Institute.

From the Publisher:

“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.