Salon

Throughout the last decade, Russian popular literature has actively experimented with various popular Western genres, trying to adapt them for domestic soil. Some of these attempts proved successful, with detective stories by Alexandra Marinina and other authors now re-exported in translation all over Europe.

But plenty of genres remain up for grabs. One of these is the kind of ironic romance represented by Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" and, of course, Helen Fielding's "Bridget Jones's Diary."

To occupy this slot, two young authors, Andrei Zhvalevsky and Yevgenia Pasternak, wrote a short novel entitled "M+W. To Hell With That Dress!" (M+Zh. A Chyort s Nim, s Etim Platyem). It is a diary-like account of the romance between two young urban professionals -- Sergei, a native Muscovite, and Katya, who comes from a provincial town. In an interesting twist on the genre, the authors wrote the story from two points of view -- a man's and a woman's (hence the title).

Zhvalevsky previously wrote a successful parody of the Harry Potter books with co-author Igor Mytko, while Pasternak comes from a family with a history of literary achievements. They seem to be promising candidates for writing this type of love story. But something went wrong.

While trying to write a commercial book, the authors somehow lost interest in the plot, the characters and their lives. This attitude plagues much of modern writing, and is especially evident in glossy magazines, whose writers create a make-believe world of elegant businesswomen and trendy web designers with a passion for Armani suits. In reality, the Russian middle class still differs a lot from its Western counterpart -- it's younger, poorer, less sure of itself and heavily burdened with the Soviet past. The trick of replacing the real world with a more glamorous invented one works on the scale of a magazine article, but fails in a novel. Especially when the authors look down on their heroes and feel slightly ashamed of them.

Zhvalevsky and Pasternak tried, all right; they peppered the book with recognizable details of everyday Moscow life and apparently gave the characters some of their own idiosyncrasies and habits. But the plot, based on flimsy coincidences, some of which are never explained, just doesn't hold together. Even the showy device of having two narrative voices doesn't really work: There is no discernible difference in how the main characters see the world -- none of the usual "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" tension; their dialogues just get repeated almost literally, and that's about it.

Perhaps the first Russian attempt at "Bridget Jones's Diary" failed because Russia still has to wait for Bridget Jones and her surroundings to materialize.