Russians turn their backs on great literature

MOSCOW - The Soviet Union prided itself on being "the best read country in the world" with children famously able to recite large chunks of Alexander Pushkin by heart.

"Literacy is the path to Communism", proclaimed a striking agitprop poster from 1920 depicting a vivacious figure on a winged red horse with book in hand.

But new surveys commissioned by Russia's National Library show that ordinary Russians have turned their backs on literature in droves and that those who do read prefer Danielle Steele to Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

The surveys found that 37 per cent of Russians never read books, that 52 per cent never buy them, and that only 23 per cent consider themselves active readers.

The surveys showed that people prefer detective novels and Mills and Boon-type romance books to the classics of Russian literature penned by such greats as Leo Tolstoy or Anton Chekhov.

The Russian National Library said the rot set in during the 1990s in the anarchic post-Soviet period when people needed light relief as opposed to harrowing psychological reads.

"In the 1990s the prestige of education and the general cultural level of the population decreased which led to the gradual disappearance of books from people's everyday lives," it said.

Russia's Book Union said it was deeply unhappy with the findings.

However the outlook is not all gloomy. New Russian literature which captures people's imaginations is still being crafted.

One such example is writer Boris Akunin, whose Sherlock Holmes-style tales of a Tsarist-era sleuth called Erast Fandorin have become cult reading material.

- INDEPENDENT