Russian readers like their authors conservative, and dead.

Asked to name their country’s greatest writers in a new survey, Russians stick with the classics. The Levada Center’s survey of 1,600 Russians is topped, predictably enough, by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Pushkin. So far, so normal. UK polls can be similarly old-fashioned. Work your eyes down the list of names and, unsurprisingly, they are almost exclusively male. And there is not a single living author in the top 10 choices.

Russian readers: top 10 authors

Author	Famous works
Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852)	Novel Taras Bulba (1835), the play Marriage (1842)
Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-1984)	And Quiet Flows the Don (1928)
Mikhail Lermontov (1814-1841)	A Hero of Our Time (1839, revised in 1841)
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940)	The Master and Margarita (1966-67)
Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)	The Lower Depths (1902)
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)	War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1873-1877)
Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883)	Fathers and Sons (1862)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)	Crime and Punishment (1866), The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)	The plays Uncle Vanya (1897), Three Sisters (1900) and a number of short stories
Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)	Novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1825-1833), the play Boris Godunov (1872)

Is this the best of Russian literature? Are living or female Russian writers not worth reading? Clearly not; there are legions of highly original, thought-provoking, contemporary female authors, like Lyudmila Ulitskaya (sneaking in as the penultimate name on the list) and Marina Stepnova. Lisa Hayden, author of popular blog Lizok’s Bookshelf and a specialist in post-Soviet Russian fiction, has observed that the survey’s wording did not favour anyone “new”, since it asks people to name “outstanding” or “prominent” writers. Of course, with that criteria, people tend to think of Tolstoy and Chekhov first, and not necessarily Mikhail Shishkin, Vladimir Sorokin or Oleg Pavlov.

But there are so many contemporary Russian writers to enjoy: Boris Akunin, best known for popular thrillers, is one of the contemporary authors who actually made it into the survey. His series of clever, tsarist-era detective stories feature the brilliantly understated diplomat-turned-sleuth, Erast Fandorin. The first book, Azazel, set in imperial Moscow, London and Petersburg, was published in English as The Winter Queen in 2003.

Another gem among the few living authors mentioned, Victor Pelevin is a master of speculative fiction. His neologism-packed 2011 novel, S.N.U.F.F. came out recently in English, translated by Andrew Bromfield; a savage satire set in a media-mad dystopia, S.N.U.F.F. explores sex, death and what it means to be human. And the outspoken author Lyudmila Ulitskaya, whose evocative 2010 novel The Big Green Tent was translated last year by Polly Gannon. Set in Moscow after Stalin’s death, The Big Green Tent is a generous, inclusive book, spanning more than four decades of Soviet life. It has an openly Tolstoyan ambition, capturing the mangled spirit of an tumultuous age through the interlocking stories of three friends.

The appearance of bestselling detective novelist, Darya Dontsova, at No 15 surprised some people who felt that penning pulp fiction whodunnits doesn’t make her a “prominent” author. This result is likely to be a reflection of what most people actually read – an author they can name. The idea that there might be right and wrong answers to the question might explain why 12% of respondents apparently could not (or would not) name a single famous author.