The “new political novel” by right-wing writers in post-Soviet Russia

Most Western commentators claim that literature and politics have moved irrevocably apart into two separate spheres in the post-Soviet period. However, I have argued in my recent book (Marsh 2007) that the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium witnessed the emergence of what I would term “the new political novel,” encompassing writers of many different political viewpoints – from Aleksandr Prokhanov’s nationalpatriotic and anarcho-communist attacks on governmental mechanisms of oppression to Aleksandr Tsvetkov’s hostility to global capitalist production and the power of the mass media. This suggests that Russian literature has once again become politicized, perhaps because writers living in Putin’s “managed democracy” feel that they are as remote from the levers of power as they were in the Soviet period.