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Scholars of popular romance have extensively studied the forms of literary reference that predominate in Anglo-American romance fiction, but to date little work has been done on patterns of allusion in the romance novels that are being written in other languages and areas of the globe, partly in imitation of Western models. This article examines literary references in one emerging romance tradition: the original romance novels that Russian authors began to produce shortly after translations of Western romance fiction first entered the Russian book market at the beginning of the 1990s. Considering first a forty-book sample of recent novels and then two texts in particular, Galina Kulikova’s Tender Fruit and Natal'ia Mironova’s Nastasia Filippovna Syndrome, the author shows that Russian romance novels, unlike the Western novels that inspired them, rarely make allusion to specific works or subgenres of romance fiction, instead relying predominately on allusions to the classics. This pattern of references reflects both proscriptive attitudes to reading from the Soviet period that continue to shape Russian culture today and the still amorphous nature of the romance genre as it is emerging in Russia.