St. Petersburg "Lenizdat" is experiencing a rebirth

The former ABC team moved to Lenizdat with the firm intention to revive the pride of the publishing press of the USSR.

Founded in 1918, having gone through four reorganizations and not having stopped its activities during the war, Lenizdat immediately fell into decay with the onset of 1991. In 2003, the management finally changed, in 2007 a complex of buildings was sold, in 2009 the publishing house was finally liquidated, and the brand was overbought by the founder of the ABC Maxim Kryutchenko.

Once the editor-in-chief of the North-West and the owner of the ABC, Kryutchenko, in 2008 signed an agreement on the incorporation of the ABC into the ABC-Atticus, and in 2011 Maxim sold the remaining part of the shares to Atticus. Following him in 2012, he left the ABC publishing house of chapters. editor Aleksey Gordin because of disagreements with the administration, having moved to Lenizdat completely.

Kryutchenko and Gordin argue that “Lenizdat” will not become “Alphabet No. 2” - work is planned in a completely different format. The first to be prepared for publication is a collection of poems by Anna Akhmatova, already prepared in 1968 by Lenizdat, but never published, by Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother, Revolution 2.0 by Wael Ghanim, which tells of recent events in Egypt.

The immediate plans of the publisher include the release of children’s literature in print and electronic format, the release of classic paperback literature, the release of modern Russian literature, foreign translation, art history, and the publication of books by young authors in St. Petersburg.

It will be possible to see and evaluate the results of the activity of the resurrected Lenizdat in the fall at non-fiction, a book fair for which the publishing house is now actively preparing.

Nick Kassirov