Article: Readin', Russians, and romance: so Tolstoy's not Russia's best seller? When was he?

Book sales in post-communist Russia are exploding, reports The Washington Post. Russians are demonstrating a bottomless, virtually insatiable hunger to read. But the paper's story, which appeared in July and was filed by Post correspondent David Hoffman, is told as much in sorrow as in celebration. What Russians are reading these days, he writes, "falls well short of the country's great literary tradition."

The very headline breathes a cultural sigh: "It Isn't Tolstoy, but Russians Are Reading Up a Storm." And what the stuff that isn't Tolstoy is, is a lot of pulp fiction, how-to books, ephemeral celebrity bios, quickie translations of formula romance and science ...

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