The writers Russians don't read – and you should

A new survey has found that living writers are not much favoured in Putin’s Russia, and there are many reasons why, but readers are missing out

Asked to name their country’s greatest writers in a new survey, Russians stick with the classics. The Levada Center’s survey of 1,600 Russians is topped, predictably enough, by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pushkin. So far, so normal. UK polls can be similarly old-fashioned. Work your eyes down the list of names and, unsurprisingly, they are almost exclusively male. And there is not a single living author in the top 10 choices.

Related: Lyudmila Ulitskaya: why I'm not afraid of Vladimir Putin

Contemporary writers in Russia are often bleak and challenging... unlikely to win huge global audiences

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