On Wednesday, the annual non/fiction book fair opens at Moscow's Central House of Artists at 10 Krymsky Val. The event, labeled an "exhibition of intellectual literature," is taking place for the seventh time.

The strange spelling of the event's name, featuring a slash instead of the more conventional hyphen, reflects the curious status of nonfiction writing in Russia today. Despite the recent wave of interest in journalistic, history and popular science books in the West, Russia has remained largely immune to the trend. Treatises on the occult are more popular than psychology books, even lowbrow self-help ones; the most popular historians here are Lev Gumilyov, with his vague agenda of Russia's uniqueness, and Anatoly Fomenko, a mathematician set on refuting -- very passionately and very ignorantly -- the traditional chronology of world history. In science, a recent success was Alexander Nikonov's "Ape Upgraded" (Apgreid Obezyany), a patchy retelling of the evolutionary theories of authors such as Desmond Morris and Richard Dawkins, but without the stylistic accuracy and scientific background of these prototypes. In Russia, "intellectual literature" remains limited to postmodernist fiction and cultural anthropology.

The exhibition is being promoted as an international event. The guest of honor this year is Poland: Polish books will figure prominently on the stalls, and a round table on the Polish book industry will be held Thursday. Other events are dedicated to new German books, translations from French and Ukrainian-language books from Canada.

Two other exhibitions are taking place concurrently with non/fiction. One will be devoted to the concept of the "Artist's Book" -- a genre undervalued in Russia, according to the organizers, who are striving to create a more favorable environment for artists designing their own books and albums. It's hard to say whether this event will boost the genre, but publicity is vital for this interesting and unusual craft.

Another exhibition coupled with non/fiction is a salon of antique books. Due to its turbulent history, Russia's approach to the rare-books market differs greatly from that of any Western nation. Russians, unlike Westerners, almost never have household libraries with an uninterrupted history going back more than 50 years -- wars, revolutions, hunger and political repression have made quiet, hereditary book-loving impossible. That's why any book from before World War II automatically becomes an antique, to say nothing of pre-1917 volumes. Some booksellers have capitalized on this: The basement of the Moskva bookstore, for example, offers ordinary magazines, notebooks and hardbacks from the 1920s and 1930s at exorbitant prices, and there's a steady demand. Civilizing this market and, quite possibly, finding new ways to make it even more profitable are among the goals of the upcoming exhibition.