A series of five articles scandalously decrying the Russian Booker, the new literary prize imported from England.

The center of the post-Soviet book trade established itself in the corridors of the enormous stadium built for the 1980s summer Olympic Games in Moscow. It was chaotic, even dangerous, but also presented an embarrassment of literary riches.

A literary club founded by the United Humanitarian Publishers (OGI) in 1998 in the apartment of journalist and music critic Dmitrii Olshansky (1978-), Proekt OGI represented one of the more successful attempts to reclaim the late-Soviet underground in the new, post-Soviet, capitalist world.

After the launch of Victor Pelevin’s hit novel “Generation P” in 1999, the author set out on a publicity tour in which he behaved as poorly as his own protagonist, Vavilen Tatarsky. And much like his protagonist, he proved that, in post-Soviet Russia, bad behavior sells.

Vavilon, or Babylon, began as a loose group of young poets brought together by Dmitry Kuzmin in 1988. In the post-Soviet years, the group's almanac, and then website, became a driving force behind some of the most innovative poetry of the 1990s.

In First Glove, a 1995 performance by Moscow actionist and writer Alexander Brener (1957-), the artist challenged then-President Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) to a fistfight on Moscow’s Red Square.