Lev Rubinstein, 55, belongs to the conceptual school of Russian poets. Employed in public libraries, he used filing cards to write brief, cryptic prose poems full of overheard speech and scraps of experience. Unpublished until the 90s, they were quickly acclaimed. Their tense is often conditional, their mood one of gallows frivolity. Card 51 from "A Catalogue of Comic Possibilities" is like a key to Moscow: "You could so mystify your listener that the very possibility of demystification became frankly unrealistic." But having found the key, which door was the actual entrance?
Moscow resembles those dreams which offer a resolution or explanation, only to defer it endlessly. This may have something to do with the fact that the literary culture is still in the process of being reinvented. What the outcome will be, God only knows. It looks like a race between imaginative freedom and the state's anxiety to bring cultural activity back under its control. Taxes on print media are clearly intended to accomplish this. In the meantime, things, and meanings, are fluid.
For all the westernisation visible in Moscow, sometimes understanding simply fails, with grimly surreal effect. The German writer and translator Claudia Sinnig, in Moscow to attend the Non/Fiction book fair, found herself in the company of an Orthodox priest outside a bookshop. The priest skipped the small talk and deilvered an anti-semitic rant before explaining that he'd just completed the building of a new church. He produced a photograph to prove it. There indeed was the church, but there too was the priest, completely naked. "See how beautiful I am!" he declared and then, as the shop door opened, he demanded: "Now then, where do they keep the Foucault and Derrida?"
The bookshop was Ad Marginem, which is also a publisher, notorious for the recent succès de scandale, Vladimir Sorokin's Blue Fat, a wild, scabrously satirical SF/porno/fantasy novel. A youth organization called Marching Along Together, said to be sponsored by leading politicians, attempted first to burn the book and then persuade buyers to hand it in for more discreet disposal. Sorokin was taken to court on charges of disseminating pornography. He won, and Blue Fat has since sold more than 200,000 copies.
According to Alexander Gavrilov, editor of Book Review and a leading light in Non/Fiction - who chaired the organisation's four-day seminar on criticism - literature has displaced politics in the interests of many young Russians. Finding the established Moscow book fairs monolithic and unrepresentative, Gavrilov and his colleagues saw the need to offer quality and critical discussion, to help redress the dominance of mass market fiction which followed the end of the Soviet state - and which, perhaps not coincidentally, accompanied widespread political apathy after the disappointed hopes of the Democratic Russia movement and the economic agonies of 1990s. The title Non/Fiction is strange at first, since the packed House of Artists was heaving with novels, but the intention is to emphasize seriousness over banal entertainment.
Now in its fourth year, Non/Fiction has forced the hands of the authorities by attracting the attention of the Frankfurt Book Fair, whose director, Volker Neumann, was in attendance. A team of Russian authors will go to Frankfurt next year, where Russia is to be special guest, to give a better account of Russian writing than the traditional exhibit. Last year's Russian stand was described by Alexander Ivanov of Ad Marginem as a cross between Scientology and North Korea, featuring a photograph of President Putin, plus Cossacks on video.
Ivanov's account was greeted with laughter, but he was ticked off by a journalist who announced that she would certainly not be printing these vile and unwarranted insults in her paper. Ivanov went on grinning, even as a man from the press ministry explained that next year's Frankfurt team would consist of 10 novelists, 10 poets, 10 critics, 10 writers under 30, 10 from the provinces, 10 dead ones... chosen by a committee including representatives of Aeroflot, an ice hockey star and Miss Moscow. I may have imagined the last part, but there were certainly odd echoes of literary life in Britain.
These manoeuvrings suggest a further mutation in the life of the Russian intelligentsia. The first years of the story are vividly described in Masha Gessen's 1997 book Dead Again: The Russian Intelligentsia after Communism. Writers were exposed to an indifferent world; the closure of research institutes left academics jobless; dissidents were drawn into the bloodthirsty compromise of parliamentary politics; Russia became embroiled in a futile and murderous war in Chechnya. How could books carry any weight in comparison? What would become of those whose identities depended on the intimacy of their opposition to the regime when the regime itself dissolved?
Non/Fiction reaffirms a literary seriousness which has never gone away in Russia, but which now urgently seeks international contacts. A walk round an average branch of Waterstone's shows how little contemporary Russian writing is generally available in Britain. The Moscow publisher Glas, run by the indefatigable Natasha Perova, publishes English translations of such work, including Rubinstein, with novelists including Asar Eppel, Andrei Sergeev and Ludmila Ulitskaya - but they must be sought out. The translator Marian Schwarz, described a comparable situation in the United States, which made it bizarre when Perova described how a leading New York publisher, finally awake to Russian writing, asked her how Glas dare interfere with the market by publishing translations itself. Change is on the way, and, naturally, the virtuous need not expect to prosper. What persists, though, is the sense of missionary obligation which has fuelled the life of the intelligentsia since it emerged in the 1830s. And, not to be glib, it was noticeable that - despite some obvious feuds - literary conversation tended to concern itself with writing rather than writers. Imagine that.
During Non/Fiction, a poetry anthology, 10/30, was launched, featuring young poets, traditional formalists whose only manifesto was to be unhindered by history and labels. Not unsympathetically, the poet and critic Alexander Shatalov remarked that they might prove "to be riding an old bicycle" - reinventing the wheel - which might not carry you very far. That thought recurred one day when the New Arbat bridge, where Yeltsin's tanks formed up to bombard the White House in 1993, was suddenly cleared of traffic and fell silent. Putin's armoured motorcade went by at comet-speed, like power being brandished, like Gogol's nightmare troika at the close of Dead Souls, headed who knows where. Literature will have to find out.
· Sean O'Brien's latest book, Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001, is published by Picador.
