It is a great honor for any writer to be read not only at home, but also abroad. On the shelves of bookstores today you can see a lot of foreign literature marked "Bestseller", and the question immediately arises: is Russian literature popular abroad, and who exactly did the foreign reader love most of all?
It turns out that in Europe and the United States, the names of Russian writers are no less recognizable than the names of Russian ones. Many of the Russian geniuses are even very popular outside of Russia.
Many are probably familiar with Dmitry Glukhovsky's "Metro" dilogy. Both works of the dilogy literally became a sensation in the world of modern Russian literature. And later it turned out that the story of the large-scale tragedy caused by the nuclear war in Moscow, which forced the survivors to hide in the subway and fight for "domination in the new world", caused a considerable sensation in Germany. More than a quarter of a million copies of Metro 2033 and Metro 2034 were successfully sold there.
However, the German reader prefers not only stories about survival in the post-apocalyptic world of Glukhovsky, but also the detectives of Polina Dashkova, who can paint him in all colors the life of the modern Russian people. The books of our compatriot have been sold in Germany since the 2000s. There are already over a million copies sold.
With the same pleasure in Germany they read the novels of Lyudmila Ulitskaya. Her highly successful novel Through Line has sold 150,000 copies. Probably, most of all foreign readers in Ulitskaya's works are attracted by her universal human themes and the humanistic philosophy with which she relates to them. It is amazing how the most acute problems are solved through the women's fates described in her works. In addition, Lyudmila Ulitskaya is popular not only in Germany: over ten thousand copies of her works are sold annually in Hungary, and over twenty thousand in France.
Another Russian writer, Nikolai Lilin, seems to have forever conquered Italy and the hearts of its readers with his work Siberian Education, in which he describes the tragic fate of a Siberian tribe a lesson doomed to live in a foreign land by the cruel and inexorable Stalin in the distant 30s of the last century. In 2013, the Italian director Gabriele Salvatores shot a film of the same name starring John Malkovich.
It cannot be said that Russian classical literature had much greater success abroad than is contemporary today. So, L. N. Tolstoy, M. A. Bulgakov, B. L. Pasternak, F. M. Dostoevsky, A. P. Chekhov and the works of these literary geniuses, like many other Russian writers, still remain in the hearts of millions of foreign readers.
