“Bestsellery Moskvy,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, no. 33 (16 Aug 1994): 6–7.

Source

“Bestsellery Moskvy,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, no. 33 (16 Aug 1994): 6–7.

Description

Post-Soviet Russia's first bestseller lists, compiled by the weekly industry newspaper Knizhnoe obozrenie and published from late 1993 through 1998.

Era

Post-Soviet

Date

1995

Annotation

The 1990s bestseller lists published in The Book Review (Knizhnoe obozrenie), the trade periodical of Soviet and post-Soviet publishing, represent perhaps the most sustained testament to a nearly boundless faith that markets would be able to successfully regulate not only commerce, but culture as well.
The term was introduced in the pages of The Book Review even before the fall of the Soviet Union, in January 1991, as a foreign term characteristic of mature markets of culture where supply and demand were successfully synchronized. By contrast, “defining the bestseller in our country is a difficult task, almost hopeless,” wrote The Book Review. “With us, all too often one thing is desired for reading, another is read, a third is published, and as for what people buy, well …” In the ensuing years, The Book Review built an apparatus for measuring reader demand that surveyed fifteen bookstores and 150 newsstands in Moscow and represented the top ten bestsellers in categories familiar to the Western consumer (but never particularly salient in Soviet-era publishing): hard and soft cover, fiction and non-fiction.
The bestseller lists first appeared on 26 Nov 1993, as a small notice in the bottom corner of page 2, but soon blossomed into a full-page feature in the center of every issue. Soon, the lists were joined by features attempting to understand or demystify the bestseller’s success with titles like “Anatomy of a Bestseller” “The Life of a Bestseller” or, here, “The Magic of the Bestseller.” In 1995, the facing page was given over to a weekly feature called “Formula for Success” that promised to teach Russian publishers how to reproduce the bestseller’s market effect.
In these bestseller lists and the apparatus around them, we can see many aspects of 1990s culture that represent the hope for a marketized culture: the enthusiastic adoption of market terminology, a statistical approach to measuring and representing the apparently objective workings of the market, and finally, a realization that those objective workings can be manipulated by a anyone clever enough to decode the “formula for success.” In this way, the bestseller lists represent not only the faith in markets, but also the growing polemics around market power. The list presented here includes a third category beyond fiction and non-fiction, that of “‘Intellectual’ Bestsellers.” The presence of this category indicates a certain unease with the notion that the book world can be reduced to nothing more than the very bestselling publications.

Associated People

Averin, Evgeny

Geography: Place Of Focus

Moscow

Bibliographic Reference

“Bestsellery Moskvy,” Knizhnoe obozrenie, no. 33 (16 Aug 1994): 6–7.