Quadrant readers will be familiar with the great classics of Russian literature and will probably have read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and perhaps Gogol’s Dead Souls. The writers mostly known to the West from the Soviet period are undoubtedly Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his novels The First Circle and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and Boris Pasternak for his beloved Doctor Zhivago. But which novelists rose to prominence during perestroika and after the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union? [1] In the new market economy, the means of literary production and distribution were quickly…