Salon

The popularity and mass appeal of nonfiction books, one of the most distinctive flavors of the Western book market of the last decade, shows no sign of abating. The strength of this trend has been recently confirmed by the unprecedented unanimous decision of the jury of the Whitbread Book Award -- one of the most prestigious literary prizes in the English-speaking world -- to give its 2005 Book of the Year Award to Hilary Spurling for her monumental biography, "Matisse the Master."

As usual, Russia has not quite caught up with the latest Western trend. However, one branch of nonfiction -- social history -- seems to have taken root in local soil. A prime example of this type of book was "A Thousand Years of Insights: A History of Things." Written by historian Sergei Ivanov, the book told the story of everyday objects -- from a fork to a microscope -- in historical detail and with excellent writing and illustrations. Immediately after its publication by Moscow's Slovo in 2002, the book sold out and is still unavailable.

Translations of Western bestsellers of this kind followed. Kolibri, a new Moscow publishing house with a pronounced interest in nonfiction, issued Jack Kelly's "Gunpowder: The History of the Explosive That Changed the World" and "The Rear View," a brief history of buttocks by the French historian Jean-Luc Hennig. The first book concentrated on politics, travel, warfare and conquest, while the second covered cultural issues and erotica from the Venus of Willendorf to the Marquis de Sade.

Now Russian authors seem to be jumping on the bandwagon. An OGI series, "Nation and Culture," has issued several books on the traditions and folklore of Russian prisons by Yekaterina Yefimova and also Ilya Utekhin's "Stories from Communal Life," which describe the unique Soviet phenomenon of communal apartments. NLO, in its turn, brought out "The Hollow Woman" by Linor Goralik, which was unusual because the Russian author studied a typically Western phenomenon, the Barbie doll.

Autobiographies and memoirs have always been popular with the Russian reading public, but now it seems that biographies are gaining momentum, judging from the enthusiastic response to new works in the genre such as the recent biography of Boris Pasternak by Dmitry Bykov. Still largely absent from store shelves are popular science books, although they sell well in the West. Perhaps this is a temporary delay; perhaps it is due to the attitudes of Russians today, who often seem to be hostile to science and all that it embodies.