Yauza
Entry updated 3 October 2022. Tagged: Publisher.
Russian publishing house, initially established in Moscow in 1993 to publish children's literature and works for Young Adults. Since 2006, it has been affiliated with the Eksmo mega-publisher, drifting steadily into an output increasingly favouring War novels and Military SF.
On several occasions, Yauza has been the instigator of controversial publishing lines of Military SF, repackaging and republishing older works and commissioning new Pulp sf works with a clear propaganda agenda. The first, inaugurated in 2005 after the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, ran under the umbrella title "Future War", and concentrated largely on stories in which Ukraine was the theatre of Future War operations. Dmitry Iankovskii's Rapsodiya gneva ["Rhapsody of Wrath"] (2000), in which NATO forces attempt to invade Crimea, was repackaged with a new cover design, along with a series of all-new novels by writers such as Fedor Berezin. A second series in 2009, "On the Threshold of War" was exclusively devoted to Future War in Ukraine, featuring works by Berezin again, Gleb Bobrov and Georgiy Savitsky, amongst others. A third series in 2010, "Tomorrow's Wars", broadened the scope to include scenarios with other enemies, including China and Japan.
The critic Maria Galina observes that in spite of the incendiary nature of some of Yauza's output, many of its most controversial works have surprisingly small print-runs, as if they exist to serve an agenda extraneous to that of garnering sales to readers. [JonC]
further reading
- Maria Galina. "Ressentiment and Post-Traumatic Syndrome in Russian Post-Soviet Speculative Fiction: Two Trends" in The Post-Soviet Politics of Utopia: Language, Fiction and Fantasy in Modern Russia (London: I B Tauris, 2020) edited by Mikhail Suslov and Per-Arne Bodin [nonfiction: hb/]
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