This chapter presents an assortment of writers who apparently have little in common. Some of them have partial affinities with other possible groupings – for example, the writers of fantastic or historical prose, “women's literature,” the so-called “alternative literature,” and the “tough” and “cruel” prose that is the topic of the following chapter. None of them, however, displays any of these tendencies with sufficient prominence to warrant an exclusive categorization. The range of their ages – they were born between 1934 and 1951 – is considerably wider than that of the “forty-year-olds,” so that they cannot be considered as a generation.

These writers, in fact, give evidence of the increased variety in Russian literature as it developed during the latter years of the Soviet regime. In years to come, surely, a longer perspective will make possible a reasonably firm classification of each of these writers, and some may simply fade into the shadows of literary history. For the moment, however, each of them seems significant, in his or her unique literary contours. In the late 1980s Mikhail Kuraev (born 1939), heretofore a film scenarist, made his debut as a prose writer by applying a fresh and original perspective to thematics that had already become well established in the immediately preceding years: Soviet history and the moral devastation caused by Stalinism.