Library staff told Ksenia Sobchak's Krovavaya Barynya channel that the book remains available on reader request but is being taken out of the reading rooms. The novel was published by Gorodets in 2021.
The quote on the cover is taken from a 2019 review Yuzefovich wrote for Meduza and referred to a different Pelevin novel, published in 2018. Pelevin has publicly supported the war in Ukraine.
An employee at one Moscow library said librarians check the "foreign agents" registry, the federal list of extremist materials, the list of extremists and terrorists, and an industry list of books mentioning drugs once a week. When new names appear in the first three lists, staff search the internal library database for mentions of those people, checking not only authorship but also imprint data, annotations and cover quotes.
A library in St Petersburg said it does not carry out such checks.
In June, Deputy Culture Minister Zhanna Alekseeva said on the sidelines of the St Petersburg International Legal Forum that the ministry was working to create a closed repository for "destructive literature." She said at the time that Russian libraries had stopped adding books by "foreign agent" authors to their collections and do not use them in exhibitions or cultural and educational events.