RAY GUSTINI || ATLANTIC WIRE || JANUARY 2012

Today in publishing and literature: Amazon Publishing strikes a licensing deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Vladimir Putin wants Russia to have a canon to call its own, and the beautiful, impractical, and gaudy homes of successful authors.

Vladimir Putin wants to establish a hundred book “Russian Canon” that’s more rigid and purpose-driven than the Western Canon, which at this point is really just a list of some really good books you might enjoy reading before you die, though will probably skip when they pop up on the syllabus of a course you’re taking in college. He made the suggestion in an essay of several thousand words that appeared in Russia’s Nezavisimaya Gazeta newspaper earlier in the week. Putin is certain that maintaining “[a] kind of civilizational identity is based on preserving the dominance of Russian culture.” Hence, his plan for the Canon. He proposes “a survey of our most influential cultural figures [to] compile a 100-book canon that every Russian school leaver will be required to read,” he writes. Putin gets somewhat hazy on what to do after the list of 100 is established “[Students] would be asked to write an essay on one of them in their final exams,” he suggests. “Or at least let us give young Russians a chance to demonstrate their knowledge and world outlook in various student competitions. State policy with regard to culture must provide appropriate guidelines.” Considering what the state has deemed appropriate from his own political critics, that phrase is chilling. Putin knows he can’t get away with omitting texts from titans like Fyodor Dostoyevsky or Aleksandar Solzhenitsyn from the canon, but he’ll quietly raise the profile of “Soviet-era schlock churned out by Writers’ Union foot soldiers who glorified their compatriots’ miserable existence,” predicts Alexander Nazaryan. The project, he writes, isn’t about literature or pointing Russian schoolchildren to 100 great books from their homeland. It’s all about “Rusianness” and Putin’s attempts to dictate what that entails. [Page Views] >>READ MORE

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