Literary Capitalism and the Economy of Prestige (Russian Literary Prizes of the 1990s and 2000s. From the Triumph to the Big Book Award)

Two prizes, the Booker and the Triumph were founded almost simultaneously, and both claimed to be the first independent prize in post-Soviet Russia. But only one - the Booker - played a significant role in the literary process of the 1990s. In this article, I argue that the Booker's success can be attributed to its foreign provenance and its capitalist orientation. Though many in the literary world looked to prizes to uphold aesthetic value against the growing force of the market, they nevertheless turned to a prize with an explicit market orientation. As the Booker became an important "instance of consecration" (in Pierre Bourdieu's terms) it connected post-Soviet literature to neoliberal capitalism, becoming part of a broader system of "literary capitalism," in which the market is the central site of negotiation in literary relations.