This book explores a range of (mis)uses of the Russian classical literature canon and its symbolic capital by contemporary Russian literature, cinema, literary scholarship, and mass culture. It outlines processes of current canon-formation in a situation of the expiration of a literature-centric culture that has been imbued with specific messianism and its doubles.The book implements Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the cultural field, focussing on a field's constitutive pursuit of autonomy and on its flexible resistance to the double pressure of the political field and the economic field. It...