Anastasia, a 17-year-old reader in Balabanovo, outside Moscow, gives the same advice to anyone who asks where to begin with Chinese literature: start with the web novels, start with fantasy. She wanted to read Dream of the Red Chamber and could not get through it. Then she read Legend of Fuyao and The Rise of Phoenixes, followed the mythology in them back to Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, and returned to the classical novel. This time it worked. She now describes herself as absorbed by the traditional culture inside it.
Her path is not unusual in the Russian market, and publishers have noticed the order in which it happens.
What the Shelves Now Hold
“Demand grew unexpectedly. Chinese literature went from a niche interest to a big seller,” said Maria Rudneva, editor-in-chief of Freedom Publishing House. She added that readers turned out to want the books, and to be actively interested in discovering new serialised titles. The chain Reading City (阅读城市) now stocks Chinese web novels on its shelves, and between January and September 2026 it sold 86,000 Chinese books across its stores, a figure that includes the web-fiction titles.
Behind that growth curve sits a mechanism. Fantasy fiction that mixes romance, adventure and traditional material travels first through screen adaptation, which pulls in readers who were never looking for Chinese books at all. From there the traffic reverses: a viewer finishes a drama, an animation or a film and goes looking for the source novel, which is the sequence Rudneva describes when she talks about accumulation rather than a single breakout hit.
Paper First, Then Everything Else
The structural difference between the two markets is the format. In China these novels run chapter by chapter on digital platforms, often for years; in Russia they arrive mainly as printed books. That single difference dictates the rest of the chain, because a print edition requires a translator, an editor and a publisher before a reader can hold it, and it takes a physical object to get onto a bookshop shelf at all.
Print also does something digital serialisation does not. A book can be kept, lent and given, and those three acts are how a foreign literature builds a stable readership rather than a spike. The same logic explains why the market’s growth looks slow in the data and steady on the ground: each title that reaches a shelf represents a completed negotiation, not an upload.
Notes and Glossaries Do the Work
Institutional support has followed the demand. China was guest of honour at the 39th Moscow International Book Fair, and its stand drew steady traffic. Xie Xiaocheng, director of the international exhibition centre at China National Publications Import and Export Group, said Russian readers showed strong interest in Chinese web literature and in the traditional culture behind it. Beyond the fair, authors appear in person: Tianxia Guiyuan met readers in Moscow and noted that they ask about the cultural logic behind a character’s decisions, not only about what happens next.
That is where the editorial work becomes visible. Translators and editors add footnotes and build glossaries so that a reader who does not know the referent can keep going; the apparatus is usually invisible in reviews and decisive in practice. Rudneva describes a second layer of reading, in which a finished novel sends the reader into history, symbols and literary tradition, and the notes are what make that layer reachable.
For anyone publishing into a foreign market, the sequence is the useful part. Readers arriving from a screen do not want an exotic spectacle; they want enough cultural context to understand why a character acts as he does. A glossary is not a supplement to the book. In this market it is the part that decides whether the book is finishable, and finishable books are the ones that produce a reader who comes back for the classical novel afterwards.
