Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies: The Symbolic Capital of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov [Hardcover]

Literature is not only about aesthetics, but also almost equally about economics. The successful marketing of an author and his literary works is more dependent on the activities of cultural merchants than on the particular words and phrases found in the authors prose. Marketing Literature and Posthumous Legacies focuses on the creation of symbolic capital for the literary legacies of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov that was eventually exchanged by cultural merchants for financial and ideological profit. Yuri Leving and Frederick H. White discuss the ways in which certain cultural merchants created symbolic meaning for these two authors through a process of collusion, consecration, and the marketing of tangible and intangible products that lead to some sort of transaction. The promotion and maintenance of posthumous legacies involves an intricate network of personal interests that drive the preservation of literary reputations.

Yuri Leving is professor and chair of the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University.
Frederick H. White is the associate dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Utah Valley University.

Frederick H. White and Yuri Leving have joined forces to produce a book devoted to analyzing the preservation and consecration of the literary legacies of Leonid Andreev and Vladimir Nabokov. Their goal is to demonstrate that the underlying economic factors of marketing literature and posthumous legacies are real. One of the book's salient features is to translate this in itself uncontroversial claim into the language of Pierre Bourdieu. This is a study of the production, protection, and transportation of symbolic capital across national and ideological boundaries. The Russian Review

This is a stimulating and lively volume which calls attention to matters that scholars will want to explore in considering the works, the lives, and the legacies of other Russian writers as well. Slavic and East Eulƒ@