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After more than a decade of negotiating between creative autonomy and public taste, Russian film-makers have found no magic formula. Still, a sizeable handful of recent films have succeeded in drawing domestic audiences into theatres. (The construction of modern multiplex cinemas with stadium seating and reliable heating helps as well.) Successful post-Soviet films manipulate generic formulae to probe contemporary concerns. Thrillers like Balabanov's Brother (Brat, 1997) offer amoral killer-heroes who may promise safety in a lawless society. Comedies like Dmitrii Astrakhan's Everything Will Be OK (Vse budet khorosho, 1995) provide 'escape into another world, imagined or real'. And war films like Prisoner of the Mountain (Kavkazskii plennik, 1997) and The Cuckoo (Kukushka, 2001) feature attractive soldier-heroes who are abandoned by their army and their community.[111] If the film-maker 'with a pragmatic frame of mind and a calculating self-interest has succeeded the figure of the director who was ostentatiously distant from material problems and fully engaged in the problems of art',[112] director Valerii Todorovskii welcomes the shift: 'I think it's a feature of the new generation of Russian filmmakers that they don't try to educate anyone. They understand that cinema should entertain people and give them pleasure, and, if it can, create some original, new world.'[113]

Literature benefited immediately from the steady expansion of opportunity and erosion of prohibitions ushered in by glasnost', despite a tug-of-war between liberals and conservatives that lasted for several years.[114] Censorship was formally abolished on 1 August 1990, but long before that Glavlit had lost most of its teeth. Editors, once the first-line censors, made decisions with little regard for political or ideological criteria, except as they might affect circulation figures. As a result of the 1990 law, formerly underground and unofficial journals gained legal status: more than 400 registered within a few months. Most printing facilities and access to paper supplies remained in the hands of the Communist Party, so the newly independent journals faced an abundance of practical handicaps. For a few years, however, until financial exigencies forced many journals to close down, editors reintegrated into Russian culture an extraordinary range of once-banned material, from poetry and fiction written in the 1920s (Evgenii Zamiatin's 1920 dystopian novel We (My), for one) to novels written thirty or forty years later (Vasilii Grossman's Forever Flowing (Vse techet), Nabokov's novels), from samizdat texts by authors living abroad to texts written 'for the drawer' by Soviet authors who had simply waited until circumstances changed. Contemporary authors who had published throughout the years of zastoi now took up crusading pens (Rasputin's Fire (Pozhar, 1985); Astaf'ev's SadDetective (Pechal'nyi detektiv, 1986); Aitmatov's Executioner's Block (Plakha, 1986)), and works appeared by Tatyana Tolstaya, Viktor Erofeev, Mikhail Kuraev - writers whose 'vision of the world evolved prior to glasnost, even if the publication of their works did not'.[115] In addition, readers had access to a bewildering array of pulp fiction - thrillers, romances, pornography - lying cheek by jowl with political pamphlets and 'serious' literature on the stalls outside metro stations.

As the period of Gorbachev's rule drew to an end, writers and critics gradually abandoned the time-honoured civic and social role of literature, its functional utility. Viktor Erofeev, speaking for many, rejected the demand that writers be 'priest, and prosecutor, and sociologist, and expert on questions of love and marriage, and economist, and mystic'.[116] Readers adapted more slowly, rebuffing writers for 'offering no deep thoughts, no beautiful feelings, no attractive characters, not the least ray of hope'.[117] Accustomed to publicistic, polemical and pedagogic prose that sought to expose or ridicule the system, they spurned much of the 'alternative' literature on offer, mainly fiction 'ostensibly divorced from any specific social and historical context... sometimes real, sometimes fantastic', and often outrageously explicit in its sexual references and obscenities.[118]

Dubbed by one Russian critic 'post-socialist realist baroque',⁸⁵ the fiction of writers like Valeriia Narbikova and Valentin Sorokin is bleak and often shocking, written in response to 'an all-pervasive mass culture [originating] in ideology, deeply permeating the language as well as the visual landscape ... [Their work] can be read as a passionate response to a society that lived on hypocrisy and shame, combining grandiose pretensions to moral righteousness with an almost unparalleled capacity for violence.' Sorokin, in particular, depicts 'a schizophrenic world in which the stock characters of Soviet literature - solid officials, eager young men, wry old codgers who have seen a thing or two - turn out on inspection to be monsters and perverts, and where everyday

Soviet language - the language of apparent sense and morality - is seen as no more meaningful than the raving of lunatics'.[119]

Post-Soviet chernukha (black fiction), published in serious periodicals, appealed to readers because it 'legitimized their own knowledge that such things [homelessness, prostitution, army hazing, etc.] existed', and its authors spurned any and every kind of ideology in favour of'corporeal truth'.[120] In time chernukha became 'the chief medium for chronicling everyday life', with 'new Russians' (that is, newly and ostentatiously wealthy) replacing the heroes and heroines drawn from the dregs of society, and material abundance - banquets, orgies - replacing suffering and physical humiliation. For the new hero, power alone retains meaning, and 'all other norms that traditionally relate to morality become absolutely arbitrary and are defined by almost insignificant factors'.[121]In Vladimir Tuchkov's 'Master of the Steppes' (Novyimir no. 5,1998), for example, the protagonist, a successful businessman, values Tolstoy and Dostoevsky for precisely those episodes where evil triumphs. He constructs his own 'hamlet', hires 'serfs' for $2,000/year, abuses them in the manner of Dostoevskian sadists - and his employees eagerly extend their contracts, regarding their master 'not as an eccentric man of means but as their very own father - strict but fair and incessantly concerned for their welfare'.[122] Thus the 'morality' of boundless power prevails over any spiritual value system that condemns such power.

Intriguing, but dispiriting - and hardly enticing to citizens who no longer equate literature with culture, who rarely opt for the self-reflexivity and self- parody of much current 'high' literature, and who much prefer books they enjoy, like the twelve-volume series called 'The Romanovs: A Dynasty in Novels', police procedurals by Aleksandra Marinina, and the escapades of Viktor Dotsenko's hero, an Afghan veteran known as the 'Russian Rambo'.[123]The Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research concluded in 1998 that one- third of Russians do not read at all; 95 per cent of those who do read exclusively choose 'light reading',[124] mostly homegrown products. Various kinds of detective stories - domestic and historical crime novels, female detective novels, 'techno-thrillers' - attract the most readers, principally because they depict 'genuine nobility, people of duty and honor', and because, whatever their time frame, they deal with contemporary concerns: 'how to live in a period of property redistribution, bureaucratic and criminal lawlessness, terrorism, the spread of drug addiction, unsavory public relations campaigns, corruption, loss of social status, and the destruction of public morals'.[125] In Western societies 'high' literature became estranged from popular culture half a century ago. The exigencies of politics and history artificially postponed that rift in the Soviet Union. It is now a reality.