ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the benefits and pitfalls of pursuing complex litigation tactics, as well as the matters of international law underlying such disputes. In 1990 and 1991 many critics who until then had written sympathetically about politically-committed anti-Soviet belleslettres switched their attention and preferences to the literary " underground", which was then confidently coming up to the surface and moving onto the stage of public artistic life. One of the winners, the St Petersburg Vestnik novoi literatury, edited by Mikhail Berg, is a journal for aesthetes that sets itself not only against politicized Soviet criteria, but also against realism as the traditionally dominant current in Russian art. The two strongest contenders were Ural and Volga, typical Soviet provincial literary periodicals, but which by the end of 1980s had used opportunities presented by glasnost to publish hitherto banned writers and " difficult" texts, sometimes ahead of their Moscow and Leningrad colleagues.
