Registration REQUIRED by 12pm on April 4, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a book launch of “Cultural Capitalism” by Bradley Gorski. Moderated by Valentina Izmirlieva.
“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.
Bradley Gorski is assistant professor of post-Soviet literature and culture in the Slavic Department at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2018, where he also earned a Certificate from the Harriman Institute. He is co-editor of “Red Migrations: Transnational Mobility and Leftist Culture after 1917” (2024) and editor of “Crosscurrents: Russian Literature in Context,” a book series from Rowman and Littlefield. His writing has appeared in Public Books, World Literature Today, The Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere.
