Five years ago the formidable chairwoman of the first Russian Booker Prize remarked of one of the entries that she'd never been so disgusted in her life. There was an American judge on the panel, also a woman, who looked surprised. Conditioned as she and I were to the novel in the West, we had scarcely noticed what seemed to us rather quaint attempts by younger Russian novelists - aspirants for the prize - to shock and repel their readers. The new sexual and scatological candour in Russian writing was for us run-of-the-mill stuff, obviously copied from Western colleagues.

LRB 3 July 1997 | PDF Download