Launched at the same time as the Russian Booker and funded by the newly minted oligarch Boris Berezovsky (1946-2013), the Triumph Prize promised an even broader program of cultural guardianship and philanthropy.

When it was published in 1990, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's (1918-2008) traditionalist prescription for pulling Russia out of its difficulties was seen as out of touch with the times. Since then, many of the ideas the author expounded have become commonplaces in the culture of Russian revanchism.

In the weeks leading up to the Second Chechen War, Russia’s right wing publications reminded their audiences of the humiliation of the First Chechen War, and called for—nationalist, racist, brutal—revenge.

Soviet paper shortages, new computer technologies, and the lifting of censorship come together in an unexpected way in this proposal to preserve manuscripts of unpublished authors for posterity.

The book series “Contemporary Russian Prose” or the “Black Series,” published by Vagrius—one of post-Soviet Russia’s most successful commercial publishers—made bestsellers out of literary prose.