Writing in Exile: Why Russian Dissident Literature Demands Our Attention

Recently, in a small bookshop in Paris (it is, in fact, called La Petite Librairie), I found my way to what was a shockingly wide selection of foreign books in French translation. I browsed through the titles by Spanish and Portuguese language authors, carefully divided in each case between the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas. I quietly laughed to myself when I imagined what my grandfather would make of Greek and Turkish authors sharing the same shelf marked, “La littérature méditerranéenne.”

It was on the next shelf I found la literature russe. This collection was notable because unlike the others it did not contain a single living author: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov were as far as this bookstore shelf was concerned the whole of Russian literature. They were not joined by their descendants. In fact, if you were just to have that shelf in front of you, it would seem like people had ceased to write in Russian altogether after 1989.

This is a problem. Because the fact is that plenty of people have written in Russian since the fall of the Soviet Union and reading their books is one of the best ways to see what has become of Russia in the 21st century, beyond the headlines.

To be clear, I have no interest in apologia for Vladimir Putin and his regime. The current Russian state is one of the contemporary world’s worst actors. And without a doubt most, if not all, of what is now held up as great literature within Russia is little more than propaganda. This includes Russian writers who have received a fair amount of attention in the West, such as Eugene Vodolazkin—likely the best-known contemporary Russian writer outside of Russia. Trained as a specialist in Old Russian literature, Vodolazkin, who was born in Soviet Kyiv, has managed to win both the approval of the regime and a number of Western converts to Russian Orthodoxy with novels that, much like their author, wear their religiosity and moral vision openly. The fact that Vodolazkin has enjoyed such success in the international market is frankly an indictment of all of us more than anything else.

Plenty of people have written in Russian since the fall of the Soviet Union and reading their books is one of the best ways to see what has become of Russia in the 21st century, beyond the headlines.

This is not least because of the coy and frankly corrosive game which Vodolazkin has played with respect to not such the Russian invasion of Ukraine specifically, but Russkiy mir, an ideological and geopolitical concept promoted by the Russian state (and the Russian Orthodox Church) that frames a transnational cultural-spiritual community of Russian language, religion, and political influence as a unified civilizational sphere. The denial of Ukrainian political and cultural independence is grounded in the ideas of Russkiy mir. Vodolazkin has become a master at using his own life and identity to offer tacit support to this belief. And yet, Western critics, publishers, and audiences continue to ignore this fact and promote his work, searching it for Easter eggs that somehow suggest he believes differently. This is complicity spurred on by a certain kind of Western readers desire to maintain their romantic image of Russia’s past without having to engage critical with Russia’s present.

This complicity is precisely why we are obligated to look beyond Putin-approved writers, like Vodolazkin. When it comes to Russia’s best contemporary writers, most of them do not even live in Russia anymore. It is never a good sign for a country—any country—when its best writers find themselves outside its borders. Nowhere is this truer than in Russia, a nation marked by a long history of political repression alongside extraordinary literary brilliance, a rare and uneasy combination. One might even argue that, for the past two centuries, Russian literature has provided the most honest and widely accessible window into Russian culture itself, a culture that has, frequently, found itself cast—often quite rightly—as the villain par excellence of the global stage. Thus it has been through Russia’s literature that a more complex and nuanced image of the place and its people has found its way to a wider world.

This has been, in no small part, because Russia’s writers have often played an antagonistic role in the efforts of Russia’s rulers to shape a particular image of the country, including Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy—arguably Russia’s two most iconic literary geniuses. Puskin was sent into exile by Tsar Alexander I after his poem Ode to Liberty was found among the possessions of the rebels of the Decemberist uprising. And Russia’s greatest poet was under surveillance and effectively banned from publishing when he wrote Boris Godunov, his greatest theatrical work, which as a consequence was not performed until thirty years after it was written. Likewise, Leo Tolstoy, after gaining fame as a novelist for Anna Karenina and War and Peace, spent the rest of his life devoted to writing religious and philosophical texts that took direct aim at the Russian Orthodox Church and hence the link between Empire and Church on which Tsarist Russia so much relied.

This history of repression is very much alive. In the spring of 2024, an “expert center” was established under the Russian Book Union (RKS) aimed at reviewing all books published in Russia for legal compliance, particularly as the relate to new restriction on political dissent and LGBT content. The experts in question are drawn from institutions as diverse as the Russian Historical Society, the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Maxim Gorky Literary Institute. Not only have books been pulled from shelves as a result of these efforts, but writers and publishers have found themselves in prison. For example, in May of 2025, criminal cases were launched against Eksmo, Russia’s most prominent publishing house, and two of its imprints Popcorn Books and Individuum, under the country’s “LGBT extremism” law.

The regime’s focus on the publishing industry is evidence that the role of Russia’s writers as the nation’s most important truthtellers continues into the present, even if contemporary Russian literature does not occupy the revered place on the global stage of its predecessors. This lost place of prominence is the result of a number of contemporary realities, some practical and some ideological. There is, of course, the ever-tightening constraints of the international publishing market that limit the reach of any book not either a) originally published in English or b) published in a country with the money to ensure its translation and distribution into English. But even more than this, contemporary Russian literature has fallen prey to the shifting norms of cultural consumption. Under these new ideological protocols, Russian literature, along with Russian music and art, must be forsworn because of the actions of the Russian state. Or, framed less negatively, other literatures, for example Ukrainian, ought to be chosen in its place in the name of representation and justice.

While this approach to cultural engagement comes from a paradigm that has genuine value and merit, it does not serve us well when applied in the absolutist way it so often is. Moralism of any kind, even the kind of which we approve, is fairly impervious to nuance. In fact, that kind of absolutism is a good way to become part of another kind of silencing, another kind of injustice.  This includes the reality that more conservative and even reactionary readers are willing to still read Russian literature, meaning it is precisely those kind of voices that then receive widespread international attention, as has happened with Vodolazkin. In the meantime, Russian writers that have been genuinely oppressed within Russia also experience marginalization on the international market. And, frankly, you also miss a lot of brilliant literature.

This is obvious when you pick up your first text by Sergei Davydov. Born in Tolyatti in 1992, Davydov began his career as a playwright. His award winning 2012 play Leo Tolstoy 49, was shortlisted for the “Eurasia” Prize before he even graduated from Samara State Aerospace University. He has now authored over thirty plays, many to critical acclaim and commercial success. He did not turn to the novel until 2022, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In response to the invasion, Davydov not only came out publicly against the war, but he came out as a gay man, a double blow of dissent in a country where queer people are branded by law as members of an extremist group.

It was an act of bravery that cost Davydov his home and he fled to Germany shortly after. It was from Germany that he published his debut novel Springfield, a queer coming of age story set in Russia’s desolate contemporary landscape. Equal parts tragic and hilarious, Springfield resonates with the voice of a writer well studied in the Russian tradition of the grand epic.

And it is exactly the kind of voices we should be heeding at this moment. Interestingly, one of the most obvious unifying features of the best contemporary Russian writers is the disproportionate representation of queer men and women among their ranks, a particular irony given the fact that much of the repression of Russian literature has happened under the banner of combatting “LGBT extremism”—i.e. silencing queer voices and erasing queer lives.

I have written elsewhere about the journalist and sometime novelist Sergey Khazov-Cassia’s The Gospel According To… (which is available in an English translation), which is probably the most accessible way for a Western reader to understand what exactly is happening to sexual and gender and minorities in Russia today. And there is also Ilya Danishevsky, a Russian writer who has been resident in Germany since 2022. His work, including the 2018 novel Mannelig in Chains (again available in English), is particularly relevant for its focus on historical memory, which speaks to the heart of Russian propaganda around the war in Ukraine. Finally, there is Oksana Vasyakina, the poet and novelist whose debut novel Wound did manage to get a profile in Vogue, a rare moment of mainstream acceptance for the exiled Russian literary scene.

Moralism of any kind, even the kind of which we approve, is fairly impervious to nuance. In fact, that kind of absolutism is a good way to become part of another kind of silencing, another kind of injustice.

Vogue profiles aside, the survival of much of this moment in Russian literature is owed to Georgy Urushadze. Once the head of three of Russia’s most prestigious literary prizes, Urushadze co-founded the Russian publishing house Palmira and was a major player in Russian letters before he too left after the 2022 invasion. He has since founded the volunteer-run Freedom Letters, a Russian and Ukrainian language press responsible for publishing much of the Russian literary diaspora. Freedom Letters even, with appropriate caution, publishers writers still inside of Russia, some inside of prison When the press won the American Association of Publishers Freedom to Publish Award last year, Urushadze noted that “every book that reaches a reader is proof that stories can survive borders, bans, and fear.”

Of course, for a story to reach a reader, the reader must, at some level, be reachable. Somewhere along the line some in the international audience decided that Russian literature was no longer a global patrimony—at least not anything written in the past thirty years. And while much of what is now published in the country with the regime’s approval is indeed florid propaganda, outside of Russia the grand tradition of Russian literature is very much alive. In fact, one might argue it is more alive than ever.

The problem is not simply that these writers are absent from Parisian shelves. It is that we have begun to accept that absence as justified. In doing so, we risk joining the Putin regime in silencing the voices they want silenced. Russian literature has always mattered most when it stood against power. It still does. But now, more often than not, it speaks from exile. If we are serious about resisting authoritarianism and listening to the voices it silences, we should be reading the writers it has cast out—not pretending they do not exist.

Fortunately, there are increasing opportunities to do this. In response to the growth of Russia’s dissent émigré community, new Russian language bookstores have opened from Prague to London. Two new literary awards, Books of Freedom by Freedom Letters, and Dar, organized by writer Mikhail Shishkin, have been launched explicitly to honor Russian-language books that cannot be published in Russia. And major Russian language book fairs, focused on dissident literature, are becoming more common across Europe. Supporting these endeavors is critical. Otherwise, we risk doing the regime’s work for it: not by censoring these writers outright, but by allowing them to disappear from the global consciousness and allowing voices of which the regime does approve to dominate even those places technically outside its control. And disappearance, in the end, is just another form of silence.