Introduction

This chapter examines how political bias shapes the commission, translation, marketing, and reception of contemporary Russian novels in English. It begins by comparing Russian authors Mikhail Shishkin and Zakhar Prilepin, illustrating how their political stances affect their acceptability and fame in both Russia and the Anglophone West. The chapter then discusses the study's theoretical framework, centred on Jeremy Munday's work on Translation Microhistories and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, and habitus, before considering critical approaches to World Literature and other studies of literary translation from Russian.