Daniil Turovsky’s novel "Luch" pulled from sale after denunciations by Z-activists

Forwarded From Meduza — Books

Daniil Turovsky’s novel "Luch" pulled from sale after denunciations by Z-activists

Writer and journalist Daniil Turovsky said that his new novel "Luch," published quite recently by Individuum (you can read about it in this roundup), was pulled from sale. The reason was denunciations by Z-bloggers and activists. The book is now facing a new expert review, already the third one.

But unfortunately, this is only a small part of the ordeals that "Luch" has had to go through. In fact, it was already the second print run of the novel that was pulled from sale; the first one, according to Turovsky, was destroyed altogether, again after a denunciation: a voice actor who had worked on the audiobook version of the book contacted the publishing house management. Here is his quote: “the entire history of Russia is presented as something vile, as constant mockery of the people.”

"Luch" was sent for a linguistic expert review (and before that the novel had also gone through an AI censor, which, as the president of the Eksmo-AST publishing group Oleg Novikov admitted, has already become a widespread practice). Despite the book’s “overall humanistic and constructive” content, they still found “extremist fragments” in it. The first print run was destroyed.

A new print run of the book was printed with censored pages. It went on sale on July 3, 2026, and disappeared from stores on July 29.

All in all, the dystopian science-fiction novel "Luch" was on sale for less than a month.

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We hope that "Luch" will return to bookstore shelves. For now, you can read Daniil Turovsky’s first novel "Razryv" — it was with this book that our publishing house launched its fiction line. The novel is available for free in the app, and if you want to buy a paper or electronic version of the book, you can do so via this link.