# What is the best Russian-language novel of the 2000s?

> Prize-winning literary heavyweights share the shelf with dystopian satires, cult favourites and mass-market bestsellers. Pick the novel from that decade that still talks back.

*By YPB Team · Published October 28, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-russian-language-novel-of-the-2000s*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Day of the Oprichnik** — score 1000/1000
   Vladimir Sorokin's 2006 dystopian satire of a neo-medieval Russian police state, told over one day in a guardsman's life.
2. **Asan** — score 999/1000
   Vladimir Makanin's 2008 Big Book-winning novel about a Russian officer trading fuel in the Chechen war.
3. **Matisse** — score 945/1000
   Alexander Ilichevsky's 2006 novel about a physicist who drops out of society to wander Moscow's margins, Booker winner of 2007.
4. **Maidenhair** — score 862/1000
   Mikhail Shishkin's 2005 polyphonic novel, built around an interpreter for Russian asylum seekers in Switzerland, winner of the Big Book prize.
5. **The Heart of Parma** — score 764/1000
   Alexei Ivanov's 2003 historical epic about the conquest of the Ural wilderness in the 15th century.
6. **Sankya** — score 764/1000
   Zakhar Prilepin's 2006 novel about a young radical in a provincial Russian revolutionary movement.
7. **Metro 2033** — score 764/1000
   Dmitry Glukhovsky's 2005 post-apocalyptic novel set in the Moscow Metro that became a global franchise.
8. **Empire V** — score 647/1000
   Victor Pelevin's 2006 satire in which a Moscow youth is turned into a vampire feeding on money and glamour.
9. **Duhless** — score 647/1000
   Sergey Minaev's 2006 bestselling satire of Moscow's cocaine-fuelled corporate elite.
10. **The Kukotsky Enigma** — score 647/1000
   Lyudmila Ulitskaya's 2001 Russian Booker-winning family saga about a Soviet gynecologist and his household.
11. **Ice** — score 646/1000
   Vladimir Sorokin's 2002 novel about a cult that awakens 'hearts' with hammers of Tunguska ice, the core of his Ice Trilogy.
12. **The Sacred Book of the Werewolf** — score 503/1000
   Victor Pelevin's 2004 novel narrated by a two-thousand-year-old fox spirit working as a Moscow prostitute.
13. **The Librarian** — score 503/1000
   Mikhail Elizarov's 2007 Booker-winning novel about rival cults fighting over the magic books of a forgotten Soviet writer.
14. **2017** — score 503/1000
   Olga Slavnikova's 2006 Russian Booker-winning novel about Ural gem hunters on the eve of a revolution's centenary.
15. **Voltairians and Voltairiennes** — score 503/1000
   Vasily Aksyonov's playful 2004 historical novel about Voltaire and Catherine the Great, winner of the Russian Booker.
16. **The Slynx** — score 503/1000
   Tatyana Tolstaya's 2000 post-apocalyptic novel about a scribe in a mutated Moscow where books are forbidden.
17. **On the Sunny Side of the Street** — score 503/1000
   Dina Rubina's 2006 novel about a mother and daughter in wartime and postwar Tashkent.
18. **The Gray House** — score 0/1000
   Mariam Petrosyan's 2009 cult novel about a boarding school for disabled children with its own hidden laws and myths.
19. **The Yeltyshevs** — score 0/1000
   Roman Senchin's bleak 2009 novel about a family's slow collapse after moving to a dying Siberian village.
20. **The Taking of Izmail** — score 0/1000
   Mikhail Shishkin's dense, many-voiced 2000 novel that won the Russian Booker Prize.
21. **Daniel Stein, Interpreter** — score 0/1000
   Lyudmila Ulitskaya's 2006 documentary-style novel about a Jewish wartime interpreter turned Catholic priest, Big Book winner.

Tags: 2000s, books, russia, fiction