‘Some of my old acquaintances look at me as if I were a defrocked priest or something.’ — Boris Akunin

The living, astonishing voices of eleven leading Russian authors: Boris Akunin, Evgeny Grishkovets, Eduard Limonov, Yuri Mamleev, Viktor Pelevin, Ludmila Petrushevskaya, Nina Sadur, Mikhail Shishkin, Vladimir Sorokin, Tatyana Tolstaya, and Ludmila Ulitskaya.

The writers interviewed for this book represent various tendencies and age groups, reflecting the diversity of themes and styles in Russian literature, and also touching on the question of how literature is reacting to the rise of neo-conservatism and political pressure in Russian society and culture.

None of the authors were acknowledged in the Soviet Union and were carried into Russian literature on the waves of Perestroika. While Limonov and Mamleev were known abroad even back in Soviet times, the others were published in English translation only in the 1990s. They are all very well known in Russia.

The book’s general editor is Professor Anna Ljunggren from the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stockholm University in collaboration with Nikolai Bogomolov and Oleg Lekmanov of the Department of Journalism at Moscow State University.

The interviewer, Kristina Rotkirch, is a noted journalist, critic, and Finnish-Swedish translator of Russian literature.