Russian literature - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

or its émigré

Émigré

Émigré is a French term that literally refers to a person who has "migrated out", but often carries a connotation of politico-social self-exile....

s, and to the Russian-language

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union

Soviet Union

The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

. Prior to the nineteenth century, the seeds of the Russian literary tradition were sown by the poets, playwrights and writers as Gavrila Derzhavin, Denis Fonvizin

Denis Fonvizin

Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin was a playwright of the Russian Enlightenment, whose plays are still staged today. His main works are two satirical comedies which mock contemporary Russian gentry.-Life:...

, Alexander Sumarokov

Alexander Sumarokov

Alexander Petrovich Sumarokov was a Russian poet and playwright who single-handedly created classical theatre in Russia, thus assisting Mikhail Lomonosov to inaugurate the reign of classicism in Russian literature....

, Vasily Trediakovsky, Nikolay Karamzin and Ivan Krylov

Ivan Krylov

Ivan Andreyevich Krylov is Russia's best known fabulist. While many of his earlier fables were loosely based on Aesop and Jean de La Fontaine, later fables were original work, often satirizing the incompetent bureaucracy that was stifling social progress in his time.-Life:Ivan Krylov was born in...

.

From the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age, beginning with the poet and novelist Alexander Pushkin and culminating in two of the greatest novelists in world literature, Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and the short story writer and playwright Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics...

. In the Twentieth Century leading figures of Russian literature included internationally recognised poets such as Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok

Alexander Alexandrovich Blok was a Russian lyrical poet.-Life and career:Blok was born in Saint Petersburg, into a sophisticated and intellectual family. Some of his relatives were literary men, his father being a law professor in Warsaw, and his maternal grandfather the rector of Saint Petersburg...

, Sergei Yesenin

Sergei Yesenin

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was a Russian lyrical poet. He was one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century but committed suicide at the age of 30...

, Anna Achmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva was a Russian and Soviet poet. Her work is considered among some of the greatest in twentieth century Russian literature. She lived through and wrote of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Moscow famine that followed it. In an attempt to save her daughter Irina from...

, Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...

, Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...

, Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky

Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky , was a Russian poet and essayist.In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters...

, Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...

and prose writers Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...

, Ivan Bunin, Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...

, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhaíl Afanásyevich Bulgákov was a Soviet Russian writer and playwright active in the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his novel The Master and Margarita, which The Times of London has called one of the masterpieces of the 20th century.-Biography:Mikhail Bulgakov was born on...

, Andrey Platonov, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...

Early history

Old Russian literature consists of several masterpieces written in the Old Russian language (not to be confused with the contemporaneous Church Slavonic). Anonymous works of this nature include The Tale of Igor's Campaign
The Tale of Igor's Campaign
The Tale of Igor's Campaign is an anonymous epic poem written in the Old East Slavic language.The title is occasionally translated as The Song of Igor's Campaign, The Lay of Igor's Campaign, and The Lay of...

and Praying of Daniel the Immured
Praying of Daniel the Immured
"Praying of Daniel the Immured" , is a Russian literary monument of the 13th century....

. The so-called "lives of the saints" formed a popular genre

Genre

Genre , Greek: genos, γένος) is the term for any category of literature or other forms of art or culture, e.g. music, and in general, any type of discourse, whether written or spoken, audial or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Genres are formed by conventions that change over time...

of the Old Russian literature. Life of Alexander Nevsky
Life of Alexander Nevsky
"Life of Alexander Nevsky" , a Russian literary monument of the late 13th early 14th centuries....

offers a well-known example. Other Russian literary monuments include Zadonschina, Physiologist
Physiologist (Russian literature)
Originally, Physiologist was an ancient collection of stories about nature, which probably appeared in Alexandria in 200 - 300 A.D. The ancient Russian Physiologist in its 15th-century version is a translation from Bulgarian. The Bulgarian version, in turn, was translated from Greek in the 11th -...

, Synopsis
Synopsis (Russian literature)
Synopsis, also known as the Kyivan Synopsis is a historical work, first published in Kiev in 1674.Innokentiy Gizel is generally considered as the author of Synopsis, however, it is still arguable. Synopsis was the first Slavic textbook on history...

and A Journey Beyond the Three Seas
A Journey Beyond the Three Seas
A Journey Beyond the Three Seas is a Russian literary monument in the form of travel notes, made by a merchant from Tver Afanasiy Nikitin during his journey to India in 1466-1472....

. Bylina

Bylina

Bylina or Bylyna is a traditional Russian oral epic narrative poem. Byliny singers loosely utilize historical fact greatly embellished with fantasy or hyperbole to create their songs...

s – oral folk epics – fused Christian and pagan traditions. Medieval Russian literature had an overwhelmingly religious character and used an adapted form of the Church Slavonic language with many South Slavic elements. The first work in colloquial Russian

Russian language

, the autobiography of the archpriest

Archpriest

An archpriest is a priest with supervisory duties over a number of parishes. The term is most often used in Eastern Orthodoxy and Eastern Catholic Churches, although it may be used in the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church instead of dean or vicar forane.In the 16th and 17th centuries, during...

Avvakum

Avvakum Petrov was a Russian protopope of Kazan Cathedral on Red Square who led the opposition to Patriarch Nikon's reforms of the Russian Orthodox Church...

, emerged only in the mid-17th century.

XVIII Century

The modernization of Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

, commonly associated with Peter the Great

Peter I of Russia

Peter the Great, Peter I or Pyotr Alexeyevich Romanov Dates indicated by the letters "O.S." are Old Style. All other dates in this article are New Style. ruled the Tsardom of Russia and later the Russian Empire from until his death, jointly ruling before 1696 with his half-brother, Ivan V...

and Catherine the Great

Catherine II of Russia

Catherine II, also known as Catherine the Great , Empress of Russia, was born in Stettin, Pomerania, Prussia on as Sophie Friederike Auguste von Anhalt-Zerbst-Dornburg...

, coincided with a reform of the Russian alphabet and increased tolerance of the idea of employing the popular language for general literary purposes. Authors like Antiochus Kantemir, Vasily Trediakovsky, and Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhail Lomonosov

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art,...

in the earlier 18th century paved the way for poets like Gavrila Derzhavin, playwrights like Alexander Sumarokov

Alexander Sumarokov

and Denis Fonvizin

Denis Fonvizin

Denis Ivanovich Fonvizin was a playwright of the Russian Enlightenment, whose plays are still staged today. His main works are two satirical comedies which mock contemporary Russian gentry.-Life:...

, and prose writers like Alexander Radishchev

Alexander Radishchev

Alexander Nikolayevich Radishchev was a Russian author and social critic who was arrested and exiled under Catherine the Great. He brought the tradition of radicalism in Russian literature to prominence with the publication in 1790 of his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow...

and Nikolay Karamzin; the latter is often credited with creation of the modern Russian literary language.

Golden Age

The 19th century is traditionally referred to as the "Golden Era" of Russian literature.
Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

permitted a flowering of especially poetic talent: the names of Vasily Zhukovsky

Vasily Zhukovsky

Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century...

and later that of his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Pushkin is credited with both crystallizing the literary Russian language and introducing a new level of artistry to Russian literature. His best-known work is a novel in verse, Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin is a novel in verse written by Alexander Pushkin.It is a classic of Russian literature, and its eponymous protagonist has served as the model for a number of Russian literary heroes . It was published in serial form between 1825 and 1832...

. An entire new generation of poets including Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Lermontov

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov , a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, sometimes called "the poet of the Caucasus", became the most important Russian poet after Alexander Pushkin's death in 1837. Lermontov is considered the supreme poet of Russian literature alongside Pushkin and the greatest...

, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Konstantin Batyushkov

Konstantin Batyushkov

Konstantin Nikolayevich Batyushkov was a Russian poet, essayist and translator of the Romantic era.-Biography:The early years of Konstantin Batyushkov's life are difficult to reconstruct...

, Nikolay Nekrasov, Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy

Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, often referred to as A. K. Tolstoy , was a Russian poet, novelist and playwright, considered to be the most important nineteenth-century Russian historical dramatist...

, Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Tyutchev

Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev is generally considered the last of three great Romantic poets of Russia, following Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov.- Life :...

, and Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Fet

Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet , was a Russian poet regarded as one of the finest lyricists in Russian literature.-Origins:...

followed in Pushkin's steps.

Prose was flourishing as well. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

. Then came Nikolai Leskov

Nikolai Leskov

Nikolai Semyonovich Leskov was a Russian journalist, novelist and short story writer, who also wrote under the pseudonym M. Stebnitsky. Praised for his unique writing style and innovative experiments in form, held in high esteem by Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky among others, Leskov is...

, Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Turgenev

Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and playwright. His first major publication, a short story collection entitled A Sportsman's Sketches, is a milestone of Russian Realism, and his novel Fathers and Sons is regarded as one of the major works of 19th-century...

, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin

Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin , better known by his pseudonym Shchedrin , was a major Russian satirist of the 19th century. At one time, after the death of the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, he acted as editor of the well-known Russian magazine, the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, until it was banned by...

, all mastering both short stories and novels, and novelist Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Goncharov

Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov was a Russian novelist best known as the author of Oblomov .- Biography :Ivan Goncharov was born in Simbirsk ; his father was a wealthy grain merchant and respected official who was elected mayor of Simbirsk several times...

. Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

and Fyodor Dostoyevsky soon became internationally renowned to the point that many scholars such as F.R. Leavis have described one or the other as the greatest novelist ever. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

excelled in writing short stories and became perhaps the leading dramatist internationally of his period.

Other important nineteenth-century developments included Ivan Krylov

Ivan Krylov

the fabulist; non-fiction writers such as Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Belinsky

Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky was a Russian literary critic of Westernizing tendency. He was an associate of Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin , and other critical intellectuals...

and Alexander Herzen

Alexander Herzen

Aleksandr Ivanovich Herzen was a Russian pro-Western writer and thinker known as the "father of Russian socialism", and one of the main fathers of agrarian populism...

; playwrights such as Aleksandr Griboyedov and Aleksandr Ostrovsky and Kozma Prutkov

Kozma Prutkov

Kozma Petrovich Prutkov is a fictional author invented by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy and his cousins, three Zhemchuzhnikov brothers, Alexei, Vladimir and Alexander, during the later part of the rule of Nicholas I of Russia....

(a collective pen name) the satirist.

Nineteenth century Russian literature perpetuated disparate ideas of suicide

Suicide

Suicide is the act of intentionally causing one's own death. Suicide is often committed out of despair or attributed to some underlying mental disorder, such as depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, alcoholism, or drug abuse...

; it became another facet of culture and society in which men and women were regarded and treated differently. A woman could not commit the noble, heroic suicide that a man could; she would not be regarded highly or as a martyr

Martyr

A martyr is somebody who suffers persecution and death for refusing to renounce, or accept, a belief or cause, usually religious.-Meaning:...

, but as a simple human who, overcome with feelings of love gone unfulfilled and having no one to protect her from being victimized by society, surrendered herself. Many of the 19th century Russian heroines were victims of suicide as well as victims of the lifestyle of St. Petersburg, which was long argued to have imported the very idea of and justifications for suicide into Russia. St. Petersburg, which was built as a Western rather than a Russian city was long accused by supporters of traditional Russian lifestyles as importing Western ideas—the ideas of achieving nobility, committing suicide and, the synthesis of these two ideas, the nobility of suicide being among them.

Novels set in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

in particular, such as Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, published in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger...

, and Bednaia Liza (Poor Liza), follow a trend of female suicides which suggest a weakness in character which exists only because they are women; they are said by readers to be driven by their emotions into situations from which suicide seems to be the only escape. These instances of self-murder have no deeper meaning than that and, in the case of Bednaia Liza, the setting of Moscow serves only to provide a familiarity which will draw the reader to it, and away from Western novels.

Contrastingly, many novels set in St. Petersburg viewed suicide primarily through the lens of a male protagonist

Protagonist

A protagonist is the main character of a literary, theatrical, cinematic, or musical narrative, around whom the events of the narrative's plot revolve and with whom the audience is intended to most identify...

(as in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment

Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his...

) as opposed to the females who held the spotlight in the aforementioned titles. Beyond that, instead of the few females who commit suicide in these Petersburg texts being propelled to such lengths by a love so powerful and inescapable that it consumed them, financial hardships and moral degradation which they faced in the Imperial Capital contaminated or destroyed their femininity; related to this, prostitution became markedly more prominent in popular literature in the 19th century.

Another new aspect of literary suicides introduced in the Petersburg texts is that authors have shifted their gazes from individuals and their plot-driving actions to presentations of broad political ideologies, which are common to Greek

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...

and Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

heroes—this step was taken in order to establish a connection between Russian male protagonists who take their own lives and Classic

Classic

The word classic means something that is a perfect example of a particular style, something of lasting worth or with a timeless quality. The word can be an adjective or a noun . It denotes a particular quality in art, architecture, literature and other cultural artifacts...

tragic hero

Tragic hero

A tragic hero is the main character in a tragedy. Tragic heroes appear in the dramatic works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Marston, Corneille, Racine, Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Strindberg, and many other writers.-Aristotle's tragic hero:Aristotle...

es, whereas the women of the literature remained as microcosms for the stereotyped idea of the female condition. The idea of suicide as a mode of protecting one’s right to self-sovereignty was seen as legitimate within the sphere of St. Petersburg, a secular and “Godless…” capital. Unlike Classic tragic heroes, the deaths of male protagonists, such as in Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

’s Nevskii Prospekt and Dmitry Grigorovich

Dmitry Grigorovich

- Early life :Grigorovich was born in Simbirsk, where his family were members of the landed gentry. His father was Russian and his mother French. From 1832 to 1835 he studied at several French and German private schools in Moscow...

’s Svistul’kin, did not bring about great celebrations in their honor, or even faint remembrances amongst their comrades. In fact, both protagonists die lonely deaths, suffering quietly and alone in their final hours. Until the Russian revolution in 1917, such themes remained prominent in literature.

Silver Age

The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Well-known poets of the period include: Alexander Blok

Alexander Blok

, Sergei Yesenin

Sergei Yesenin

Sergei Alexandrovich Yesenin was a Russian lyrical poet. He was one of the most popular and well-known Russian poets of the 20th century but committed suicide at the age of 30...

, Valery Bryusov

Valery Bryusov

Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov was a Russian poet, prose writer, dramatist, translator, critic and historian. He was one of the principal members of the Russian Symbolist movement.-Biography:...

, Konstantin Balmont

Konstantin Balmont

Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont was a Russian symbolist poet, translator, one of the major figures of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.-Biography:Konstantin Balmont was born in v...

, Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Kuzmin

Mikhail Alekseevich Kuzmin was a Russian poet, musician and novelist, a prominent contributor to the Silver Age of Russian Poetry.Born into a noble family in Yaroslavl, Kuzmin grew up in St. Petersburg and studied music at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov...

, Igor Severyanin

Igor Severyanin

Igor Severyanin was a Russian poet who presided over the circle of the so-called Ego-Futurists.Igor was born in St. Petersburg in the family of an army engineer. Through his mother, he was remotely related to Nikolai Karamzin and Afanasy Fet. In 1904 he left for Manchuria with his father but later...

, Sasha Chorny, Nikolay Gumilyov

Nikolay Gumilyov

Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilev was an influential Russian poet who founded the acmeism movement.-Early life and poems:Nikolai was born in the town of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island, into the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev , a naval physician, and Anna Ivanovna L'vova . His childhood nickname was...

, Maximilian Voloshin

Maximilian Voloshin

Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...

, Innokenty Annensky

Innokenty Annensky

Innokentiy Fyodorovich Annensky was a poet, critic and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism...

, Zinaida Gippius

Zinaida Gippius

Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius, was a Russian poet, playwright, editor, short story writer and religious thinker, regarded as a co-founder of Russian symbolism and seen as "one of the most enigmatic and intelligent women of her time in Russia"....

. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova

Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...

, Marina Tsvetaeva

Marina Tsvetaeva

, Osip Mandelstam

Osip Mandelstam

and Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak

.

While the Silver Age is considered to be the development of the 19th century Russian literature tradition, some avant-garde poets tried to overturn it: Velimir Khlebnikov

Velimir Khlebnikov

Velimir Khlebnikov , pseudonym of Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov , was a central part of the Russian Futurist movement, but his work and influence stretch far beyond it.Khlebnikov belonged to Hylaea,...

, David Burliuk

David Burliuk

David Davidovich Burliuk was a Russian avant-garde artist of Ukrainian origin , book illustrator, publicist, and author associated with Russian Futurism...

, Aleksei Kruchenykh

Aleksei Kruchenykh

Aleksei Eliseevich Kruchenykh or Kruchonykh or Kruchyonykh , a well-known poet of the Russian "Silver Age", was perhaps the most radical poet of Russian Futurism, a movement that included Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burliuk and others. Together with Velimir Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh is considered the...

and Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was a Russian and Soviet poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.- Early life :...

.

Though the Silver Age is famous mostly for its poetry, it produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin

Aleksandr Kuprin

Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin , was a Russian writer, pilot, explorer and adventurer who is perhaps best known for his story The Duel . Other well-known works include Moloch , Olesya , Junior Captain Rybnikov , Emerald , and The Garnet Bracelet...

, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev

Leonid Andreyev

Leonid Nikolaievich Andreyev was a Russian playwright, novelist and short-story writer. He is one of the most talented and prolific representatives of the Silver Age period in Russian history...

, Fedor Sologub

Fyodor Sologub

Fyodor Sologub was a Russian Symbolist poet, novelist, playwright and essayist. He was the first writer to introduce the morbid, pessimistic elements characteristic of European fin de siècle literature and philosophy into Russian prose.-Early life:...

, Aleksey Remizov

Aleksey Remizov

Aleksei Mikhailovich Remizov was a Russian modernist writer whose creative imagination veered to the fantastic and bizarre. Apart from literary works, Remizov was an expert calligrapher who sought to revive this medieval art in Russia.-Biography:...

, Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Zamyatin

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin was a Russian author of science fiction and political satire. Despite having been a prominent Old Bolshevik, Zamyatin was deeply disturbed by the policies pursued by the CPSU following the October Revolution...

, Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Merezhkovsky

Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky, , 1865, St Petersburg – December 9, 1941, Paris) was a Russian novelist, poet, religious thinker, and literary critic. A seminal figure of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, regarded as a co-founder of the Symbolist movement, Merezhkovsky – with his poet wife Zinaida...

and Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely

Andrei Bely was the pseudonym of Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev , a Russian novelist, poet, theorist, and literary critic. His novel Petersburg was regarded by Vladimir Nabokov as one of the four greatest novels of the 20th century.-Biography:...

, though most of them wrote poetry as well as prose.

XX Century: Soviet and "White émigré" literature

The first years of the Soviet regime were marked by the proliferation of avant-garde literature groups. One of the most important was the Oberiu

Oberiu

OBERIU was a short-lived avant-garde collective of Russian Futurist writers, musicians, and artists in the 1920s and 1930s...

movement that included Nikolay Zabolotsky

Nikolay Zabolotsky

Nikolay Alexeyevich Zabolotsky - a Russian poet, children's writer and translator. He was a Modernist and one of the founders of the Russian avant-garde absurdist group Oberiu.-Life and work:...

, Alexander Vvedensky, Konstantin Vaginov

Konstantin Vaginov

Konstantin Konstantinovich Vaginov was a Russian poet and novelist. In twenties he was a member of almost all the poetic groups of Saint Petersburg. In 1921 he joined Nikolai Gumilyov's Guild of Poets....

and the most famous Russian absurdist Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms

Daniil Kharms was an early Soviet-era surrealist and absurdist poet, writer and dramatist. One of his pseudonyms, which was signed in Latin alphabet, was Daniel Charms.- Life :...

. Other famous authors experimenting with language were novelists Andrei Platonov

Andrei Platonov

Andrei Platonov was the pen name of Andrei Platonovich Klimentov , a Soviet author whose works anticipate existentialism. Although Platonov was a Communist, his works were banned in his own lifetime for their skeptical attitude toward collectivization and other Stalinist policies...

and Yuri Olesha and short story writers Isaak Babel and Mikhail Zoshchenko

Mikhail Zoshchenko

-Biography:Zoshchenko was born in 1895, in Poltava, but spent most of his life in St. Petersburg / Leningrad. His Ukrainian father was a mosaicist responsible for the exterior decoration of the Suvorov Museum in Saint Petersburg. The future writer attended the Faculty of Law at the Saint Petersburg...

.

In the 1930s Socialist realism

Socialist realism

Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...

became the officially approved style. Several acclaimed Soviet novelists of the time were Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...

, Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize in Literature

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction"...

winner Mikhail Sholokhov, and Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy , nicknamed the Comrade Count, was a Russian and Soviet writer who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and historical novels...

; and poets Konstantin Simonov

Konstantin Simonov

Konstantin Mikhailovich Simonov was a Russian/Soviet author, known especially as a war poet.-Early years:He was born in Petrograd. His mother was born Princess Obolenskaya, of a Rurikid family. His father, an officer in the Tsar's army, left Russia after the Revolution in 1917. He died in Poland...

and Aleksandr Tvardovsky

Aleksandr Tvardovsky

Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky was a Soviet poet, chief editor of Novy Mir literary magazine from 1950 to 1954 and 1958 to 1970...

are being read in Russia to this day. Other Soviet celebrities, such as Alexander Serafimovich

Alexander Serafimovich

Alexander Serafimovich was a Russian/Soviet writer and a member of the Moscow literary group Sreda.-Early life:...

, Nikolai Ostrovsky

Nikolai Ostrovsky

Nikolai Alexeevich Ostrovsky was a Soviet socialist realist writer, who published his works during the Stalin era...

, Alexander Fadeyev, Fyodor Gladkov

Fyodor Gladkov

Fyodor Vasilyevich Gladkov was a Soviet Socialist realist writer born on in Chernavka, Saratov gubernia to a family of Old Believers. He died on December 20, 1958 in Moscow. Gladkov joined a Communist group in 1904, and in 1905 went to Tiflis and was arrested there for revolutionary activities....

or Demyan Bedny

Demyan Bedny

Demyan Bedny, was the pen name of Soviet Russian poet, Bolshevik and satirist Yefim Alekseevich Pridvorov .-Life:Efim Pridvorov was born to a poor family in Gubovka, in what is now Kirovohrad Oblast in Ukraine. He attended the village school followed by a feldsher training college in Kiev. This...

have never been published by mainstream publishers after 1989.

Few of the pre-World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

Soviet writers could be published without strictly following the Socialist realism guidelines. A notable exception were satyrics Ilf and Petrov

Ilf and Petrov

Ilya Ilf Ilya Ilf Ilya Ilf (Ilya Arnoldovich Faynzilberg and Evgeny or Yevgeni Petrov (Yevgeniy Petrovich Kataev or Katayev were two Soviet prose authors of the 1920s and 1930s...

, with their picaresque novel

Picaresque novel

The picaresque novel is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts, in realistic and often humorous detail, the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society...

s about a charismatic con artist Ostap Bender

Ostap Bender

Ostap Bender is a fictional con man and antihero who first appeared in the novel The Twelve Chairs written by Soviet authors Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov and released in January 1928.-Appearances:...

.

Writers like those of Serapion Brothers

Serapion Brothers

The Serapion Brothers was a group of writers formed in Petrograd, Russia in 1921. The group was named after a literary group, Die Serapionsbrüder , to which German romantic author E.T.A. Hoffmann belonged and after which he named a collection of his tales...

group, who insisted on the right of an author to write independently of political ideology, were forced by authorities to reject their views and accept Socialist realism principles. Some 1930's writers, such as Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov

, author of The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consider the book to be one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and one of the foremost Soviet satires, directed against a...

, and Nobel-prize winning Boris Pasternak

Boris Pasternak

with his novel Doctor Zhivago
Doctor Zhivago
-Original creation:*Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak, published in 1957**Yuri Andreyevich Zhivago, a fictional character and the main protagonist of the book Doctor Zhivago-Adaptations:There are several adaptations based on the Doctor Zhivago book:...

continued the classical tradition of Russian literature with little or no hope of being published. Their major works would not be published until the Khrushchev Thaw

Khrushchev Thaw

The Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...

and Pasternak was forced to refuse his Nobel prize.

Meanwhile, émigré writers, such as poets Vyacheslav Ivanov

Vyacheslav Ivanov

Vyacheslav Ivanov may refer to:*Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov, Russian Symbolist poet and philosopher*Vyacheslav Nikolayevich Ivanov, Russian rower who became the first three-time Olympic gold medalist in the single scull event...

, Georgy Ivanov

Georgy Ivanov

Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov was a leading poet and essayist of the Russian emigration between the 1930s and 1950s.As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his young manhood in the elite circle of Russian golden youth. He started writing pretentious verses, imitative of Baudelaire and the French...

and Vladislav Khodasevich

Vladislav Khodasevich

Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich was an influential Russian poet and literary critic who presided over the Berlin circle of Russian emigre litterateurs....

; novelists such as Gaito Gazdanov

Gaito Gazdanov

Gaito Gazdanov was a Russian émigré writer of Ossetian extraction. His real name was Georgi Ivanovich Gazdanov .- Biography :...

, Mark Aldanov

Mark Aldanov

Mark Aldanov was a Russian emigrant writer, known for his historical novels.Mark Landau was born in Kiev in the family of a rich Jewish industrialist. He graduated the physical-mathematical and law departments of Kiev University. He published serious research papers in chemistry. In 1919 he...

and Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov

and short story Nobel Prize

Nobel Prize in Literature

winning writer Ivan Bunin, continued to write in exile.

The Khrushchev Thaw

Khrushchev Thaw

brought some fresh wind to the literature. Poetry became a mass cultural phenomenon: Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko is a Soviet and Russian poet. He is also a novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, actor, editor, and a director of several films.-Early life:...

, Andrei Voznesensky, Robert Rozhdestvensky

Robert Rozhdestvensky

Robert Ivanovich Rozhdestvensky was a Soviet poet who in the broke with the Social Realism in 1950s–1960s and, along with such poets as Andrey Voznesensky, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and Bella Akhmadulina, pioneered a newer, fresher, and freer poetry in the Soviet Union.-Life:Robert Rozhdestvensky...

and Bella Akhmadulina read their poems in stadiums and attracted huge crowds.

Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, like short story writer Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Shalamov

Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov , baptized as Varlaam, was a Russian writer, journalist, poet and Gulag survivor.-Early life:Varlam Shalamov was born in Vologda, Vologda Governorate, a Russian city with a rich culture famous for its wooden architecture, to a family of a hereditary Russian Orthodox...

and Nobel Prize winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

, who wrote about life in the gulag

Gulag

The Gulag was the government agency that administered the main Soviet forced labor camp systems. While the camps housed a wide range of convicts, from petty criminals to political prisoners, large numbers were convicted by simplified procedures, such as NKVD troikas and other instruments of...

camps, or Vasily Grossman

Vasily Grossman

Vasily Semyonovich Grossman was a Soviet writer and journalist. Grossman trained as an engineer and worked in the Donets Basin, but changed career in the 1930s and published short stories and several novels...

, with his description of World War II events countering the Soviet official historiography. They were dubbed "dissidents" and could not publish their major works until the 1960s.

But the thaw did not last long. In the 1970s, some of the most prominent authors were not only banned from publishing, but were also prosecuted for their Anti-Soviet sentiments or parasitism

Parasitism

Parasitism is a type of symbiotic relationship between organisms of different species where one organism, the parasite, benefits at the expense of the other, the host. Traditionally parasite referred to organisms with lifestages that needed more than one host . These are now called macroparasites...

. Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the country. Others, such as Nobel prize winning poet Joseph Brodsky

Joseph Brodsky

, novelists Vasily Aksyonov

Vasily Aksyonov

Vasily Pavlovich Aksyonov was a Soviet and Russian novelist. He is known in the West as the author of The Burn and Generations of Winter , a family saga depicting three generations of the Gradov family between 1925 and 1953.-Early life:Vasily Aksyonov was...

, Eduard Limonov

Eduard Limonov

Eduard Limonov is Russian writer and political dissident, and is the founder and leader of radical National Bolshevik Party. An opponent of Vladimir Putin, Limonov is one of leaders of Other Russia political bloc.-Early life:...

and Sasha Sokolov

Sasha Sokolov

Sasha Sokolov is a paradoxical writer of Russian literature....

, and short story writer Sergei Dovlatov, had to emigrate to the US, while Venedikt Yerofeyev and Oleg Grigoriev

Oleg Grigoriev

Oleg Grigoriev was a Russian poet and artist. He is regarded as a successor of the Oberiu tradition. Many of his short poems became modern folklore.-Biography:...

"emigrated" to alcoholism. Their books were not published officially until perestroika

Perestroika

Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...

, although fans continued to reprint them manually in a manner called "samizdat

Samizdat

Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader...

" (self-publishing).

In the 1970s there appeared a relatively independent Village Prose

Village Prose

Village Prose was a movement in Soviet literature beginning during the Khrushchev Thaw, which included works that focused on the Soviet rural communities. Some point to the critical essays on collectivization in Novyi mir by Valentin Ovechkin as the starting point of Village Prose, though most of...

, whose most prominent representatives were Viktor Astafyev and Valentin Rasputin

Valentin Rasputin

Valentin Grigoriyevich Rasputin is a Russian writer. He was born and lived much of his life in the Irkutsk Oblast in Eastern Siberia. Rasputin's works depict rootless urban characters and the fight for survival of centuries-old traditional rural ways of life...

. Detective fiction and spy fiction was also popular, thanks to authors like brothers Arkady and Georgy Vayner and Yulian Semyonov

Yulian Semyonov

Yulian Semyonovich Semyonov , pen-name of Yulian Semyonovich Lyandres , was a Soviet and Russian writer of spy fiction and crime fiction.-Career:...

.

The Soviet Union produced an especially large amount of Science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

literature, inspired by the country's space pioneering

Soviet space program

The Soviet space program is the rocketry and space exploration programs conducted by the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics from the 1930s until its dissolution in 1991...

. Early science fiction authors, such as Alexander Belyayev, Grigory Adamov, Vladimir Obruchev

Vladimir Obruchev

Vladimir Afanasyevich Obruchev was a Russian and Soviet geologist who specialized in the study of Siberia and Central Asia. He was also one of the first Russian science fiction authors.- Scientific research :...

, Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy , nicknamed the Comrade Count, was a Russian and Soviet writer who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and historical novels...

, Alexander Kazantsev

Alexander Kazantsev

Alexander Petrovitch Kazantsev was a popular Soviet science fiction writer and ufologist.-Biography:Born in Akmolinsk, Imperial Russia . He graduated from Tomsk Polytechnic University, and worked in Soviet Research institute of Electromechanics. Kazantsev was a member of Soviet delegation at the...

, stack to hard science fiction

Hard science fiction

Hard science fiction is a category of science fiction characterized by an emphasis on scientific or technical detail, or on scientific accuracy, or on both. The term was first used in print in 1957 by P. Schuyler Miller in a review of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Islands of Space in Astounding Science...

, being influenced by H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

and Jules Verne

Jules Verne

Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...

.

Since the thaw in the 1960s Soviet science fiction began to form its own style. Philosophy, ethics

Ethics

Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

, utopia

Utopia

Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...

n and dystopia

Dystopia

A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...

n ideas became its core, and Social science fiction

Social science fiction

Social science fiction is a term used to describe a subgenre of science fiction concerned less with technology and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society...

was the most popular subgenre. Books of brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky

The brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are Soviet Jewish-Russian science fiction authors who collaborated on their fiction.-Life and work:...

, and Kir Bulychev

Kir Bulychev

Kir Bulychev or Bulychov was a pen name of Igor Vsevolodovich Mojeiko , who was a Soviet and Russian science fiction writer and historian. He received a Master's degree in 1965 and a Ph.D. in 1981 and wrote his first science fiction story in 1965...

, among others, are reminiscent of social problems and often include satire

Satire

Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...

on contemporary Soviet society. Ivan Yefremov, on the contrary, arose to fame with his utopia

Utopia

n views on future as well as on Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece

in his historical novels. Strugatskies are also credited for the Soviet's first science fantasy

Science fantasy

Science fantasy is a mixed genre within speculative fiction drawing elements from both science fiction and fantasy. Although in some terms of its portrayal in recent media products it can be defined as instead of being a mixed genre of science fiction and fantasy it is instead a mixing of the...

, the Monday Begins on Saturday

Monday Begins on Saturday

Monday Begins on Saturday is a 1964 science fiction / science fantasy novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. Set in a fictional town in northern Russia, where highly classified research in magic occurs, the novel is a satire of Soviet scientific research institutes, complete with an inept...

trilogy.

Space opera

Space opera

Space opera is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes romantic, often melodramatic adventure, set mainly or entirely in outer space, generally involving conflict between opponents possessing advanced technologies and abilities. The term has no relation to music and it is analogous to "soap...

subgenre was less developed, since both state censors and "serious" writers watched it unfavorably. Nevertheless, there were moderately successful attempts to adapt space westerns to Soviet soil. The first was Alexander Kolpakov with "Griada", after came Sergey Snegov with "Men Like Gods", among others. Bulychov, along with his adult books, created children's space adventure series about Alisa Seleznyova

Alice, Girl from the Future

Alice, Girl of the Future, also known as Alice, the Girl from Earth, is a collection of science fiction stories for children by Kir Bulychev, published in 2002...

, a teenage girl from the future.

Post-Soviet era

End of the 20th century has proven a difficult period for Russian literature, with relatively few distinct voices. Among the most discussed authors of this period were Victor Pelevin

Victor Pelevin

Victor Olegovich Pelevin is a Russian fiction writer. His books usually carry the outward conventions of the science fiction genre, but are used to construct involved, multi-layered postmodernist texts, fusing together elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies...

, who gained popularity with first short stories and then novels, novelist and playwright Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Sorokin

Vladimir Georgievich Sorokin is a contemporary postmodern Russian writer and dramatist, one of the most popular in modern Russian literature.-Biography:...

, and the poet Dmitry Prigov

Dmitri Prigov

Dmitri Aleksandrovich Prigov was a Russian writer and artist. Prigov was a dissident during the era of the Soviet Union and was briefly sent to a psychiatric hospital in 1986....

.

A relatively new trend in Russian literature is that female short story writers Tatyana Tolstaya

Tatyana Tolstaya

Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya is a Russian writer, TV host, publicist, novelist, and essayist from the Tolstoy family.- Family :She was born into a family of rich literary tradition. Her paternal grandfather was Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, an important Russian-Soviet writer known as 'the Red...

or Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a Russian writer, novelist and playwright.The Moscow-born Petrushevskaya is regarded as one of Russia's most prominent contemporary writers, whose writing combines postmodernist trends with the psychological insights and parodic touches of writers such as...

, and novelists Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya is a critically acclaimed modern Russian novelist and short-story writer. She was born in the town of Davlekanovo in Bashkiria on February 21, 1943...

or Dina Rubina

Dina Rubina

Dina Ilyinichna Rubina is a Russian-Israeli prose writer. Her most famous work is Dual Surname which was recently turned into a film screened on Russia's Channel One.Rubina writes in Russian.-English Translations:...

have come into prominence.

Detective stories and thrillers have proven a very successful genre of new Russian literature: in the 90s serial detective novels by Alexandra Marinina

Alexandra Marinina

Alexandra Marinina is a best-selling Russian writer of detective stories.-Biography:...

, Polina Dashkova and Darya Dontsova

Darya Dontsova

Darya Dontsova - is a Russian writer of detective novels. She produced several dozen such commercially successful books and also kitchen books and three autobiographies....

were published in millions of copies. In the next decade a more highbrow

Highbrow

Used colloquially as a noun or adjective, highbrow is synonymous with intellectual; as an adjective, it also means elite, and generally carries a connotation of high culture. The word draws its metonymy from the pseudoscience of phrenology, and was originally simply a physical descriptor...

author Boris Akunin

Boris Akunin

Boris Akunin is the pen name of Grigory Shalvovich Chkhartishvili , a Russian writer. He is an essayist, literary translator and writer of detective fiction.-Life and career:...

with his series about the 19th century sleuth Erast Fandorin

Erast Fandorin

Erast Petrovich Fandorin is a fictional 19th-century Russian detective and the hero of a series of Russian historical detective novels by Boris Akunin. The first novel was published in Russia in 1998, and the latest was published in December 2009...

became widely popular.

Fantasy

Fantasy

Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...

and Science fiction literature is still among best-selling with authors like Sergey Lukyanenko

Sergey Lukyanenko

Sergei Vasilievich Lukyanenko is a science fiction and fantasy author, writing in Russian, and is arguably the most popular contemporary Russian sci-fi writer...

, Nick Perumov

Nick Perumov

Nick Perumov is the pen name of Nikolay Daniilovich Perumov , a Russian fantasy and science fiction writer.- Biography :Perumov was born November 21, 1963 in Leningrad, USSR. He began writing short stories since he was a teenager, and after reading The Lord of the Rings in the early 1980s, he...

and Maria Semenova. A good share of modern Russian science fiction is produced in Ukraine, especially in Kharkiv, home to H. L. Oldie

H. L. Oldie

Henry Lion Oldie, or H. L. Oldie is the pen name of Ukrainian science/fantasy fiction writers Dmitry Gromov and Oleg Ladyzhensky. Both authors reside in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and write in Russian. On Eurocon 2006 in Kiev, the European Science Fiction Society named them the Europe's best writers of...

, Alexander Zorich

Alexander Zorich

Alexander Zorich is the collective pen name of two Russian writers; Yana Botsman and Dmitry Gordevsky. The two write in Russian, in genres such as science fiction, fantasy and alternate history, as well as PC game scenarios.- Yana Botsman :...

, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko — Maryna Y. Dyachenko and Serhiy S. Dyachenko are spouses and Ukrainian co-authors of novels and plays. They write in Russian and Ukrainian languages. The primary genres of their books are modern science fiction, fantasy, and fairy tales...

, Yuri Nikitin and Andrey Valentinov. Significant contribution to Russian horror literature has been done by another Ukrainian author Andrey Dashkov

Andrey Dashkov

Andrey Dashkov is a contemporary horror fiction writer which resides in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and writes in Russian. Genre of Dashkov's first novels may be defined as dark fantasy...

.

The tradition of the classic Russian novel continues with such authors as Mikhail Shishkin

Mikhail Shishkin

Mikhail Pavlovich Shishkin is a Russian writer. He is widely considered as one of the best contemporary Russian writers and praised for depth and complexity of his books and for his perfect command of Russian literary language.-Biography:...

and Vasily Aksyonov

Vasily Aksyonov

.

The leading poets of the young generation are arguably Dmitry Vodennikov

Dmitry Vodennikov

Dmitry Vodennikov is a Russian poet and essayistIn 2002, he was named as one of the ten best living Russian poets in a poll of 110 leading Russian poets and critics, being one of just two poets under 35 in the top ten. Some critics name him as "perhaps the best known poet of his generation",...

and Andrey Rodionov, both famous not only for their verses, but also for their ability to artistically recite them.

Trent Johnson was a leading critic of Russian literature during this time.

British romantic poetry

Robert Burns

Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...

became a ‘people’s poet’ in Russia. In Imperial

Russian Empire

The Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...

times the Russian aristocracy

Aristocracy

Aristocracy , is a form of government in which a few elite citizens rule. The term derives from the Greek aristokratia, meaning "rule of the best". In origin in Ancient Greece, it was conceived of as rule by the best qualified citizens, and contrasted with monarchy...

were so out of touch with the peasantry that Burns, translated into Russian

Russian language

, became a symbol for the ordinary Russian people. In Soviet Russia Burns was elevated as the archetypical poet of the people – not least since the Soviet regime slaughtered and silenced its own poets. A new translation of Burns, begun in 1924 by Samuil Marshak

Samuil Marshak

Samuil Yakovlevich Marshak was a Russian and Soviet writer, translator and children's poet. Among his Russian translations are William Shakespeare's sonnets, poems by William Blake and Robert Burns, and Rudyard Kipling's stories. Maxim Gorky proclaimed Marshak to be "the founder of [Russia's ]...

, proved enormously popular selling over 600,000 copies. In 1956, the Soviet Union became the first country in the world to honour Burns with a commemorative stamp. The poetry of Burns is taught in Russian schools alongside their own national poets. Burns was a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

. Whether Burns would have recognised the same principles at work in the Soviet State at its most repressive is moot. This didn’t stop the Communists from claiming Burns as one of their own and incorporating his work into their state propaganda. The post communist years of rampant capitalism

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...

in Russia have not tarnished Burns' reputation.

Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, later George Gordon Noel, 6th Baron Byron, FRS , commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was a British poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement...

was a major influence on almost all Russian poets of the Golden Era, including Pushkin, Vyazemsky, Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Baratynsky, Delvig and, especially, Lermontov.

French Literature

Writers such as Victor Hugo

Victor Hugo

Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

and Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac

Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....

were widely influential.

Abroad

Russian literature is not only written by Russians. In the Soviet times such popular writers as Belarus

Belarus

Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...

ian Vasil Bykaŭ, Kyrgyz Chinghiz Aitmatov

Chinghiz Aitmatov

Chyngyz Aitmatov was a Soviet and Kyrgyz author who wrote in both Russian and Kyrgyz. He was the best known figure in Kyrgyzstan's literature.- Life :...

and Abkhaz

Abkhaz people

The Abkhaz or Abkhazians are a Caucasian ethnic group, mainly living in Abkhazia, a disputed region on the Black Sea coast. A large Abkhazian diaspora population resides in Turkey, the origins of which lie in the emigration from the Caucasus in the late 19th century known as Muhajirism...

Fazil Iskander

Fazil Abdulovich Iskander is arguably the most famous Abkhaz writer, renowned in the former Soviet Union for his vivid descriptions of Caucasian life, mostly written in Russian...

wrote some of their books in Russian. Some renowned contemporary authors writing in Russian have been born and live in Ukraine (Andriy Kurkov, Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

Marina and Sergey Dyachenko

) or Baltic States

Baltic states

The term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...

(Garros and Evdokimov).

A number of prominent Russian authors such as novelists Mikhail Shishkin

Mikhail Shishkin

, Rubén Gallego

Ruben Gallego

Rubén David González Gallego was born in Moscow, Russia, with severe cerebral palsy.Gallego was separated from his family at the age of one; he was sent to a state orphanage, because his grandfather, Ignacio Gallego, who was Secretary-General of the Spanish Communist Party, was ashamed of him and...

, Svetlana Martynchik

Svetlana Martynchik

Svetlana Yuryevna Martynchik is a Russian writer and artist who has also published under the pseudonym Max Frei.Martynchik studied at the philological department of Odessa State University, but dropped out without graduating...

and Dina Rubina

Dina Rubina

, poets Alexei Tsvetkov

Alexei Tsvetkov

Alexei Petrovich Tsvetkov is a Russian poet and essayist. Not to be confused with Alexei Vyacheslavovich Tsvetkov , a younger journalist, an editor of Limonka newspaper.-Biography:Alexei Tsvetkov grew up in Zaporizhia and briefly studied chemistry at the Odessa...

and Bakhyt Kenjeev

Bakhyt Kenjeev

Bakhyt Shkurullaevich Kenjeev is a Russian poet.-Life:In 1953 his parents moved to Moscow. He graduated from Lomonosov Moscow State University with a degree in chemistry...

, though born in USSR, live and work in West Europe, North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

or Israel

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

Themes in Russian books

Suffering, often as a means of redemption, is a recurrent theme in Russian literature. Fyodor Dostoyevsky in particular is noted for exploring suffering in works such as Notes from Underground
Notes from Underground
Notes from Underground is an 1864 short novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel...

and Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment
Crime and Punishment is a novel by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later published in a single volume. This is the second of Dostoyevsky's full-length novels following his...

. Christianity and Christian symbolism are also important themes, notably in the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

and Chekhov

Anton Chekhov

. In the 20th century, suffering as a mechanism of evil was explored by authors such as Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago
The Gulag Archipelago is a book by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn based on the Soviet forced labor and concentration camp system. The three-volume book is a narrative relying on eyewitness testimony and primary research material, as well as the author's own experiences as a prisoner in a gulag labor camp...

. A leading Russian literary critic of the 20th century Viktor Shklovsky

Viktor Shklovsky

Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky was a Russian and Soviet critic, writer, and pamphleteer.-Life:...

, in his book, Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, wrote, "Russian literature has a bad tradition. Russian literature is devoted to the description of unsuccessful love affairs."

Russian Nobel Prize in Literature winners

Ivan Bunin
Boris Pasternak
Boris Pasternak
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian language poet, novelist, and literary translator. In his native Russia, Pasternak's anthology My Sister Life, is one of the most influential collections ever published in the Russian language...
Mikhail Sholokhov
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn was aRussian and Soviet novelist, dramatist, and historian. Through his often-suppressed writings, he helped to raise global awareness of the Gulag, the Soviet Union's forced labor camp system – particularly in The Gulag Archipelago and One Day in the Life of...
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky
Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky , was a Russian poet and essayist.In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters...

External links

Encyclopedia of Soviet Writers
Maxim Moshkov's E-library of Russian literature (in Russian)
Contemporary Russian Poets Database (in English)
Contemporary Russian Poets in English translation
La Nuova Europa: international cultural journal about Russia and East of Europe
Information and Critique on Russian Literature
Russian Classics Bulletin by Erik Lindgren (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky)
History of Russian literature Brief summary
Russian Liteary Resources by the Slavic Reference Service
Search Russian Books (in Russian)
Philology in Runet. A special search through the sites devoted to the Old Russian literature.
Публичная электронная библиотека Е.Пескина

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Early history

XVIII Century

Golden Age

Silver Age

XX Century: Soviet and "White émigré" literature

Post-Soviet era

British romantic poetry

French Literature

Abroad

Themes in Russian books

Russian Nobel Prize in Literature winners

See also

External links