The remarkable decade: Russian prose in the nineties

Abstract At the dawn of a new century — and millennium — the magic of numbers is especially attractive. It goes without saying that, over the past century, developments in Russian belles-lettres have been anything but normal; the role played by ‘extra-literary’ factors has been fundamental. Repeated catastrophes inflicted on the historical-literary sphere have considerably impoverished our understanding of the recent past, leaving us either victims of ignorance, or host to exaggerated mythmaking. Moreover, I would argue that the attraction of the new millennium, on the one hand, and the current mode of looking back to the fate of Russian literature over the entire century on the other, has resulted in a new ‘blind spot’ in literary criticism, namely an absence of discussion about prose writing during the past decade.