For the rest of the 1990s, Prokhanov felt persecuted and marginalized. "Even in Soviet times I had the reputation of an "ode-singer to the State", they called me "the Army Headquarters' Nightingale". Now in all of their [new] dictionaries I've got demonized. While my friends, like Anatoly Kim, emerged as the aesthetes, I have been presented as an obscurantist. They advised Western publishers against translating me, putting me under blockade," Prokhanov complained, speaking to Zakhar Prilepin. Things changed in the early 2000s when Prokhanov found himself among the Russian literary elite, even if his prose was getting increasingly morbid, surreal and apocalyptic. As the 1999 terrorist attacks upon residential houses shocked Russia, Prokhanov accused the state secret services in plotting these attacks and based his next novel upon these suspicions. In 2002, "Mr. Hexogen" (2001) brought him the National Bestseller Award.