Salon

Reading in Russia has always been a very private affair. Even in the Soviet times, when Communist leaders boasted that the country was "the most well-read in the world," the books were confined to libraries, bedside tables and classrooms. With the general decline in reading and explosive growth of other types of entertainment, readers became even more isolated and lonely.

As usual, we started catching up when it was almost too late. However, the positive changes in public attitudes are visible. Moscow streets and subway stations are adorned with posters that invite passers-by to read and castigate those who don't. And on an even larger scale, a new publishing house was created -- Knizhnoe Obozrenie, whose main purpose will be to promote reading.

Knizhnoe Obozrenie (The Book Review) is to be centered around the eponymous newspaper; the latter will acquire a new editor, the journalist Fyodor Svarovsky, who will also lead a magazine, Book Business in Russia, while the former editor of The Book Review, Alexander Gavrilov, whose name is associated with every book-related project of the last decade, will become the director of the whole affair.

Most interestingly, another magazine will be added to the group; it will be called Chto Chitat (What To Read). It will feature the most interesting literary criticism and reviews and will be edited by Dmitry Bykov, one of Russia's most flamboyant journalists and writers.

One of the shareholders of the new publishing house is Alexander Mamut, an oligarch who already owns a major publishing group with branches in Moscow and St. Petersburg. For a businessman with heavy investments in the book business, running a magazine that recommends which books to buy is a clever move.

In an interview on the Internet portal Openspace.ru, Bykov insisted that the new magazine was not an internal literary affair. "We are targeting readers, not writers. I hope young people will actively participate," he said, even calling for potential critics to send him their unsolicited texts.

As someone who at one time or another wrote book reviews for different magazines, I know that, although almost every publication considers a book page necessary, very few pay attention to the actual needs of the book business. Thus, almost no one wanted to discuss pressing issues such as the book design quality, proofreading or even translation. With such problems exiled to the pages of specialized magazines, we could never hope for a significant and much-needed breakthrough in the quality of Russian book publishing. Now the first step in this direction has been made.