Khudozhestvennaia Literatura

(Fiction), a Soviet publishing house of the State Committee on Publishing, Printing, and the Book Trade of the USSR.

The Khudozhestvennaia Literatura State Publishing House (GIKhL) was founded in 1930 when the fiction department of the Gosizdat Publishing House merged with the Zemlia i Fabrika Publishing House. In 1934, GIKhL was renamed Goslitizdat, and since 1963 it has been known as Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. It is located in Moscow and has a division in Leningrad.

Khudozhestvennaia Literatura publishes collected works, selections, and individual volumes of classic works of fiction of the peoples of the USSR and other countries, as well as outstanding works of Soviet and contemporary foreign writers and books of literary scholarship and criticism. Series published by Khudozhestvennaia Literatura include Biblioteka proizvedenii, udostoennykh Leninskoi premii (Library of Works Awarded the Lenin Prize), Literaturnye memuary (Literary Memoirs), Biblioteka sovetskoi poezii (Library of Soviet Poetry), Biblioteka antichnoi literatury (Library of Classical Literature), Narodnaia Bibliotecka (People’s Library), and Zarubezhnyi roman XX veka (Foreign Novel of the 20th Century).

The unique 200-volume series Biblioteka vsemirnoi literatury (Library of World Literature) was published from 1967 to 1977, and publication of the multivolume Biblioteka klassiki (Library of the Classics) began in 1977. Other publications include the periodical Roman-gazeta and the magazines Moskva, Neva, Zvezda, and Detskaia literatura.

In 1978, Khudozhestvennaia Literatura published 343 book and pamphlet titles, with a total printing of approximately 51.7 million copies and a total of approximately 1.33 billion printer’s sheets.