In late May, The Guardian published its list of the “100 Best Novels”, with George Eliot’s Middlemarch taking the top spot. Unsurprisingly, not a single Ukrainian work made the ranking. Instead, the list featured the familiar canon of “great Russian literature”: Tolstoy (Anna Karenina at No. 6 and War and Peace at No. 7), Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov at No. 28 and Crime and Punishment at No. 69), Nabokov — represented by his English-language novels, Lolita at No. 25 and Pale Fire at No. 29 — and Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita at No. 66). Since the selection was made by authors, critics and scholars, the ranking can be seen, at least to some extent, as reflecting prevailing academic tastes.
Then, on 6 June, The Guardian published a “people’s” list, the “Readers’ Top 100 Novels of All Time”, compiled from the votes of more than 3,000 readers “from Uruguay to the Isle of Skye”. The survey offered a snapshot of popular literary tastes, in contrast to the earlier ranking shaped by literary professionals.
The line-up of Russian writers and novels changed only slightly in the readers’ ranking, although most of them climbed higher. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Bulgakov are represented by the same works, while Nabokov appears only with Lolita. Interestingly, both literary professionals and ordinary readers arrived at almost exactly the same selection. The absence of any real surprises makes this familiar roster of names feel less like a reflection of books people genuinely cherish and return to than a ready-made canon that has long been accepted without question.
From that perspective, the Russian propaganda machine has every reason to be satisfied. Decades of channelling petrodollars into cultural institutions around the world have clearly left their mark. From Uruguay to the Isle of Skye, from Oxford to Harvard, people can readily recite the same “gentleman’s set” of Russian authors, often dismissively summed up as the “Tolstoyan” canon.
Yet, surprising as this remarkable consensus may be — with readers across the world naming the same four towering figures of “great Russian literature” — there is no reason to invent a baseless conspiracy theory about The Guardian’s objectivity.
What is perhaps even more interesting, however, is what followed. The two lists seem to have opened Pandora’s box. On 10 June, The New Yorker recommended nine books to read this summer, unexpectedly including Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter — despite the fact that no new English translation of the novella has been published in more than a decade.
The recommendation came from Jennifer Wilson, a regular contributor to the magazine, who immediately explains her choice by noting that she wrote her Princeton dissertation on Russian literature. Yet her reasoning for recommending this particular novella is, in itself, both revealing and ambiguous: “People ask me for a rec, I know they want me to play the part of literary dominatrix and name a work of punitive intensity” — a striking allusion to the defining discourse of violence in Russian literature. She then appeals to a cultural authority that few well-read readers would readily challenge. One may disagree with Wilson, but arguing with a canonical English modernist is another matter: “Virginia Woolf praised the novels of Dostoevsky as ‘seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in’.”
Wilson then turns to something more personal and autobiographical: “When it comes to the sick pleasure we take from Russian literature, size matters: the Russians aren’t known for their brevity (‘War and Peace’ has two epilogues). Anyone seeking out a Russian novel is in the market for something weight-bearing, the kind of book that could keep a person occupied on a long march to Siberia.”
Once again, the symbolism here is hard to miss: illness, pleasure and prison — the same discourse of violence, now edged with a hint of masochism (no crime, just punishment). And, ultimately, her rationale for reading Pushkin comes into focus: “His novels are shorter than those of his compatriots in terms of word count and conveniently full of tips on how to overthrow the government.” Read The Captain’s Daughter, she suggests, because it is only 192 pages long. But readers should not be misled by the liberal-revolutionary notion that it “contains tips on how to overthrow the government”. In Pushkin’s novella, no one overthrows anything, and its protagonist ends up in exile.
In fact, before that, Jennifer Wilson quotes another authority, inadvertently revealing what, in this framing, makes this particular Russian novella a fitting summer read: “In fact, the novelist Ludmila Petrushevskaya, whose family was targeted during Stalin’s purges, told The Paris Review that her great-grandfather instructed his children to memorise as much Russian literature as they could, as ‘when they ended up in a penal colony, they’d need something to entertain their fellow prisoners with.’” And so the real reason why The Captain’s Daughter emerges as the perfect summer read is finally made clear: later on, you will be able to talk about it in prison. What further proof is needed that Russia is a prison of nations? As far as I am concerned, Wilson makes that case convincingly.
As if there had not already been enough of these Russian writers, the new issue of the London Review of Books, out on 25 June, features the headline “Gorky vs Tolstoy” on its cover. Inside, the magazine runs a review by Adam Thirlwell (already available on its website) of Maxim Gorky’s memoirs of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev, newly translated into English and published in September 2025.
There is a familiar logic at work here: just as the word “sex” on a magazine cover is said to sell glossy titles, so, in literary publishing, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky seems to do the job instead. Thirlwell’s piece itself carries the suggestive title “Luxury Muzhik”, in which he describes Gorky’s memoirs as a “strange and moving work”.
Overall, the London Review of Books essay is steeped in an almost reverential attitude towards early 20th-century Russian writers (with Thirlwell, once again, quoting Woolf, an admirer of Dostoevsky) and towards Russian realism more broadly, which, in his view, is marked by a distinctive quality — its “volatility, its characters’ mood changes and incomprehensible tears, rather than the usual cult of the detail”.
So, returning to Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko’s pivotal question — “No guilty people in the world? Reading Russian literature after the Bucha massacre”, the title of her Times Literary Supplement article from April 2022 — by June 2026 one is left with a fairly straightforward answer: we are reading much the same as before, and perhaps even more so, and even recommending it as suitable summer reading.
The world — or at least its leading literary journals — once again seems to be repeating a familiar misconception: that politics can be separated from culture.
Countless well-known and widely admired figures who voted for The Guardian’s literary selections (as listed on its website) can publicly support Ukraine — and do so — while, in the same breath, returning to War and Peace or The Master and Margarita in their leisure reading. And whereas, in the immediate aftermath of the full-scale invasion four years ago, Russian culture appeared to recede somewhat from public view, it now seems to be even more present than it was before the 2022 invasion.
Only later will it become clear whether this signals the beginning of a broader shift; for now, however, the renewed prominence of Russian literature this June looks less like a coincidence and more like a coordinated restoration of a disrupted status quo. And, of course, it also reflects the persistent blind spot of many intellectual circles across the world, which continue to separate artistic production from ideology, and Russian realism from Russian chauvinism — a distinction that sits uneasily with our turbulent times, and with all those “seething whirlpools, gyrating sandstorms, waterspouts which hiss and boil and suck us in.”
