The Russian books market in translation: doing well, could do better

Peter Blackstock is an Assistant Editor at Grove/Atlantic, an independent book publisher based in New York. He was invited to the Moscow Book Fair in 2011 as part of the American delegation in preparation for the 2012 Russia Market Focus. He studied Russian and German at Oxford University and lived for a year in Yaroslavl. He now lives in New York.

Russian writers have long been part of the international canon. Names like Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov roll off the tongues of any American or English reader as easily as their less-confusingly spelt Anglo-Saxon counterparts. But, for whatever reason, Russia’s contemporary writers have not enjoyed the same level of success. Of course, it’s a sad fact that Americans and Brits don’t like to read writers in translation, but Russians make up a very low percentage of the handful of writers that do get translated, just five percent. It’s clear that contemporary Russian books aren’t as well known or widely translated in the U.K. and U.S. as they should be.

I was, therefore, delighted to hear about a large-scale project by the Russian government’s Federal Agency of Press and Mass Communications that aims to broaden the footprint of contemporary Russian writers in the English-speaking world. The Read Russia project began in 2011, where the Russian language was chosen as the Guest of Honor at the London Book Fair.  It has continued into 2012, with no fewer than 41 Russian writers recently participating in America’s biggest publishing trade fair, Book Expo America, which took place in New York this June. The Book Expo was the focus for a broad program of events, under the catchy title “Read Russia,” targeted at publishing professionals, well-read Russian émigrés, and the American reading public. The bestselling and prize-winning writers invited to participate included Russian Booker laureate Olga Slavnikova, “National Bestseller” prize winner and general iconoclast Zakhar Prilepin, and renowned biographer Pavel Basinsky. These writers joined younger and lesser-known contemporaries in discussions, presentations, and parties. 

The project fantastically showed the range of contemporary Russian writing—while most writers who participated in the program wrote literary fiction, writers of thrillers, women’s fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, and serious nonfiction were all represented. Unfortunately, while the project will doubtlessly have drawn the attention of many acquiring editors in New York and London to the “wild East,” it’s unlikely that Russian books will be published more frequently and with more energy until one of them is phenomenally successful—in the way that Scandinavian thrillers became the latest publishing fad after Stieg Larsson’s multi-million-copy sales of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo trilogy or that editors look for the next Perfume from Germany or Suite Française from France. The finger can in part be pointed at risk-averse or uncreative editors and publishers, but there are also other nuances of the international publishing business that come into play. Publishers in the U.S. and U.K. are used to picking up writers in translation after they’ve already been successful in many other countries—Stieg Larsson, for instance, was already a big bestseller in Germany before the English language translation rights were even sold. And without a strong structure of literary agents and aggressive, well-connected rights departments at Russian publishing houses, who sell translation and film rights to the works the house publishes, it’s difficult for a Russian writer to hit bestseller stardom. But projects like Read Russia are the first step—opening the door for Russian writers and making introductions to editors and publishers. Because it only takes one successful work to blaze the trail, and then soon the whole paradigm shifts.