REALLY," SAYS ILYA DANISHEVSKY. "I do anything I want."

Really?

Really, he insists. Danishevsky has an I'm-on-top-of-the-world demeanor that is rapidly going out of style in Moscow. He wears a hipster beard and a most daring combination of stripes in his shirts and jackets, and he schedules his meetings at an ostentatiously overpriced central Moscow cafe frequented by celebrities of the vaguely oppositional ilk. At 25, he may be forgiven for being a little slow to realize that the era of fabulous flaunting is ending: The oil boom in Vladimir Putin's Russia is the only life he has known. This makes him all the more remarkable — at his age, he is editor of his own imprint at one of the country's publishing conglomerates, and he takes more literary and political risks than all of his mainstream colleagues combined. He says that this is because no one tells him what to do.

"Not even the lawyers?" I ask.