Love, Crime Top Sellers

Yevgeny Popov's "The Soul of a Patriot" has just been published by Text in Moscow. Packed with irony, the book chronicles the November 1982 events that befell the author and his friend Dmitry Prigov, the poet, on their way to pay their last respects to the deceased Leonid Brezhnev. The book, first published a few years ago in the monthly Volga, is full of details about everyday Soviet life during the last years before perestroika. The book is illustrated by the well-known dissident artist-satirist Vyacheslav Sysoyev, who spent time in jail for works that the Soviet authorities considered pornographic.


According to Izvestia, the five top genres in fiction last month in Moscow were romance (26 percent), crime (25), action (14), science fiction (14) and historical novels (8). Among the 20 fiction bestsellers there are eight romances translated from English and five detective novels.


In nonfiction, the leaders were philosophy and religion (30 percent), science (17), business (15), sports (14), and cooking and housekeeping (11).


Among nonfiction bestsellers, seven are about health care and four are about child care; one is on history; and three represent esoteric "sciences" (life after death, horoscopes and the way your name influences your character). Also on this list are books about housekeeping, espionage and sex, and a humorous entry about cats.


On the special list called "intellectual bestsellers," Russians are reading books by Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia, translations from ancient Greek and Hebrew, and works by the Russian scholars and thinkers Vasily Rozanov, Mikhail Yampolsky and Vladimir Uspensky.