The Feminine Face and American Roots of Young Russian Literature

Toward the end of the 2010s, many new authors emerged on the Russian literary scene. It was the voices of writers in their thirties that made themselves heard most strongly. Born at the twilight of the Soviet Union, they had absorbed its painful legacy with their mother’s milk before their lives took an unexpected turn. Barbies, Transformers, Disney comics, action films on VHS, the PlayStation, and finally MTV, along with access to the endless stream of information on the Internet, entered their childhood with the fall of the Iron Curtain, overturning the rigid cultural system shaped by the Soviets.

Unlike their predecessors, who shared their writings privately through self-published or handwritten copies, today’s young writers are not among those who keep silent or remain outside the frame. They openly express their opinions, gather in book clubs, and create podcasts, blogs, and YouTube channels to discuss their works. As ambassadors of a borderless literary world, they bring a new perspective to Russian literature and embody its future.

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There Was No Adderall in the Soviet Union by Olga Breininger, published in 2017, is one of the first fruits of the “literature of the age of globalization” cultivated in the Russophone space. The author herself describes her text as “a pioneering attempt to bring the reading experience of Wallace, DeLillo, Pynchon, or Ellis onto Russian soil, as well as to assert the place of the former USSR within the contemporary globalized, multicultural, and increasingly digitized world.”

In this autofiction — rough, untidy, imperfect, yet terribly appealing and sincere — Breininger explores her childhood in Kazakhstan, her parents’ emigration to Germany, her academic career at Oxford and Harvard, and finally her return to the post-Soviet space. In her universe, little remains of that famous “Sovietness,” entirely devoured by “Westernness.” Moscow appears as a global metropolis like any other: hyperconnected and economically dynamic. The shortages of the past have vanished, and above all, the city is not lacking in barbershops.

This generational novel, as its cover proudly proclaims, is in some ways overly clumsy and pretentious in its attempt to present itself as a Russophone reinterpretation of American postmodernism. And yet those young Russians born in the USSR who left the country to pursue higher education abroad and then returned to their homeland full of start-up ideas and anglicisms swarming on their tongues, will recognize themselves in it instantly. This text is for them: it is their National Anthem, as Lana Del Rey sings, a reference Breininger invokes several times.

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The Round: Optical Fiction, the second novel by journalist Anna Nemzer, published in 2018, also sets out to be a generational anthem but in reality remains a potpourri. Transgender discourse, battle rap, stand-up, and Russian activism, vigorously seasoned with the sauce of oppressive patriarchy and police violence, and spiced with feminine forms and English expressions, compose the portrait of today’s Russia depicted by the editor-in-chief of the TV Rain channel. The image is raw, the editing abrupt, the plot borrowed from Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways, while the writing style imitates that of Bret Easton Ellis in The Rules of Attraction. Written in contemporary slang, Nemzer’s text reads like a puzzle pieced together from liberal press headlines.

Unlike Breininger’s narrative, which radiates vivid energy, this novel breathes a certain fatigue and coldness. It seems conceived under torture rather than with pleasure. Once the cacophony of the opening pages has passed, the narration becomes smoother and more homogeneous, yet still struggles to captivate…

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Grabbing the reader’s interest from the very first lines is Alexey Polyarinov’s strength. He first became known for his translation of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (published in Russia in 2019), a masterful work that allowed the young writer to enter literary circles and draw attention to his own novels, Center of Gravity (2018) and The Reef (2020).

His fluid and engaging way of weaving narrative threads and creating an unsettling atmosphere in a small working-class town — Rassvet in Center of Gravity, Sulim in The Reef — easily hooks the reader and keeps them on edge. Alas, this momentum breaks quickly because of linguistic roughness and passages that ring false. Stale jokes and medical terminology lifted from psychology manuals, constantly intruding into Polyarinov’s prose, fail to replace the metaphors and dense language that convey vivid emotion. Halfway through the book, the style flattens into neutrality and insipidity, as a form emptied of content.

Center of Gravity, which begins as a coming-of-age novel before transforming into a cyberpunk bacchanal through a family saga, seems to me more successful than The Reef, which approaches the theme of sects from several angles. It is not a lack of unexpected narrative turns that makes The Reef less appealing to readers, but rather the absence of personal experience that enriches and animates the early chapters of Center of Gravity, making the text more touching and recognizable. Yet this detachment from his subject appears to be a conscious choice on Polyarinov’s part: in interviews, he states that he always wants to write about what he does not know, despite his former professors’ recommendations.

For contemporary Russian literature, Polyarinov’s work constitutes a rather remarkable phenomenon: sharply honed narrative structures and a skillfully mastered blend of genres. Yet when one imagines his texts in English translation, their “secondariness” immediately reveals itself: one sees only a bare framework, constructed after the models of American authors such as Donna Tartt, Thomas Pynchon, and, of course, David Foster Wallace.

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The Finches by Daria Bobyleva, hailed as “the scariest book” of 2018, does not seek to analyze the world or to offer a broad portrait of today’s Russia. The focus of this horror novel-in-stories lies instead on the depths of the human soul. The writer explores the shadowy corners inhabited by villagers trapped in an enclosed space, ringed by forest, after the sudden disappearance of the road that once connected their hamlet, the Finches, to the outside world. Confronted with their fears and the evil dwelling within them, the characters engage in a bloody struggle with unknown forces.

Like the authors mentioned above, Bobyleva employs narrative frameworks characteristic of American fantastic literature — her style is often compared to Stephen King’s — and intertwines them with Russian settings and Slavic folklore. The confined space of the Finches, populated with malevolent spirits rustling in the darkness and exhaling nauseating fumes, creates a dark and richly detailed landscape of a fractured society, where the “old Soviet” coexists with the “new globalized.”

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In conclusion, one may say that young Russian literature offers a vast and varied panorama, both in terms of themes and of styles and genres. Among the main trends emerging today are the rise of female voices — even Alexey Polyarinov, the only man on this list, experiments with a female point of view: first laterally, in the third person in Center of Gravity, and then fully, in the first-person feminine voice in The Reef — and the desire to integrate the American postmodern experience into a Russian setting marked by the Soviet past.