Russian literature

[1] Major contributors to Russian literature, as well as English for instance, are authors of different ethnic origins, including bilingual writers, such as Kyrgyz novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov.

[1] At the same time, Russian-language literature does not include works by authors from the Russian Federation who write exclusively or primarily in the native languages of the indigenous non-Russian ethnic groups in Russia, thus the famous Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov is omitted.

The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva.

This era produced novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.

[28] In the 16th century, reflecting the political centralization and unification of the country under the tsar, chronicles were updated and codified, the Russian Orthodox Church began issuing its decrees in the Stoglav, and a large compilation called the Great Menaion Reader collected both the more modern polemical texts and the hagiographical and patristic legacy of Old Russia.

[30] The Time of Troubles marked a turning point in Old Russian literature as both the church and state lost control over the written word, which are reflected in the texts of writers such as Avraamy Palitsyn who developed a literary technique for representing complex characters.

[34] The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum—an outstanding novelty autobiography written by the one of leaders of the 17th-century religious dissidents Old Believers Avvakum—is considered masterpiece of pre-Petrian literature, which blends high Old Church Slavonic with low Russian vernacular and profanity without following literary canons.

In contrast to most of his contemporaries, Derzhavin was highly devoted to his state; he served in the military, before rising to various roles in Catherine II's government, including secretary to the Empress and Minister of Justice.

[47] I lay, and heard the voice of God: "Arise, oh prophet, watch and hearken, And with my Will thy soul engird, Through lands that dim and seas that darken, Burn thou men's hearts with this, my Word."

[51] Other poets important to the movement include Konstantin Batyushkov, Pyotr Vyazemsky, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Fyodor Tyutchev and Dmitry Venevitinov, along with the novelists Antony Pogorelsky, Alexander Bestuzhev and "Russian Hoffmann" Vladimir Odoyevsky.

Other important 19th-century developments included Sergey Aksakov's semi-autobiographical writings; the father of Russian social realism poetry school, known for the sharp epic poem Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?

[7] Well-known poets of the period include: Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Mikhail Kuzmin, Igor Severyanin, Sasha Chorny, Nikolay Gumilyov, Maximilian Voloshin, Innokenty Annensky, Zinaida Gippius.

[55] In 1915/16, the school of Russian Formalism, wary of the futurists and highly influential for the global theory of literary criticism and poetics, appeared; its programmatic article The Resurrection of the Word by the scholar and writer Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) was published in 1914, and the peak of activity occurred in the post-revolutionary '20s.

[62][63] An integral part of the literature of the Silver Age is Russian philosophy, which reached its peak at this time (see works of Nikolai Berdyaev, Pavel Florensky, Semyon Frank, Nikolay Lossky, Vasily Rozanov, and others).

[66][67] Other famous authors experimenting with language included the novelists Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938), Yuri Olesha (1899–1960), Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) and Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938), the short-story writers Isaak Babel (1894–1940) and Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958).

Two of its members also produced influential literary works, namely Viktor Shklovsky, whose numerous books (A Sentimental Journey and Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, both 1923) defy genre in that they present a novel mix of narration, autobiography, and aesthetic as well as social commentary, and Yury Tynyanov (1893–1943), who used his knowledge of Russia's literary history to produce a set of historical novels mainly set in the Pushkin era (e.g., Lieutenant Kijé, Pushkin in three parts, 1935–43, and others).

[71] Meanwhile, émigré writers, such as poets Georgy Ivanov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Vladislav Khodasevich, surrealist Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935), and members of the 1920s–50s Paris Note (French: Note parisienne) Russian poetry movement (Georgy Adamovich, Igor Chinnov, George Ivask, Anatoly Shteiger, Lidia Tcherminskaia); novelists such as M. Ageyev, Mark Aldanov, Gaito Gazdanov, Pyotr Krasnov, Aleksandr Kuprin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Aleksey Remizov, Ivan Shmelyov, George Grebenstchikoff, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Vladimir Nabokov, and English-speaking Ayn Rand; and short-story Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet Ivan Bunin, continued to write in exile.

[66] While the realists Bunin, Shmelyov and Grebenstchikoff wrote about the pre-revolutionary Russia, life of the émigrés was depicted in modernist Nabokov's Mary (1926) and The Gift (1938), Gazdanov's An Evening with Claire (1929) and The Specter of Alexander Wolf (1948) and Georgy Ivanov's novel Disintegration of the Atom (1938).

Such remarkable writers as Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, Nikolai Klyuev, Sergey Klychkov, Pyotr Oreshin and Artyom Vesyoly, who continued to publish their works but could not get used to the socrealist principles by the end of the 1930s, were executed on fabricated charges, and Osip Mandelstam, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky died in prison.

[55][73] In the 1930s, Konstantin Paustovsky (1892–1968), an influenced by neo-Romantic works of Alexander Grin master of landscape prose, a singer of the Meshchera Lowlands, and already in the post-Stalin years a multiple nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, joined the ranks of leading Soviet writers.fantastic.

Published in 1956, Vladimir Dudintsev's novel Not by Bread Alone and Yury Dombrovsky's The Keeper of Antiquities in 1964 became two of the main literary events of the Thaw and a milestone in the process of de-Stalinization, but was soon criticized and withdrawn from circulation.

Others, such as writers and poets David Dar (1910–1980), Viktor Nekrasov (1911–1987), Lev Kopelev (1912–1997), Aleksandr Galich (1918–1977), Arkadiy Belinkov (1921–2019), Elizaveta Mnatsakanova (1922–2006), Alexander Zinoviev (1922–2006), Naum Korzhavin (1925–2018), Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997), Arkady Lvov (1927–2020), Yuz Aleshkovsky (1929–2022), Anatoly Kuznetsov (1929–1979), Vilen Barskyi, Vladimir Maksimov (1930–1995), Yuri Mamleev (1931–2015), Georgi Vladimov (1931–2003), Vasily Aksyonov (1932–2009), Vladimir Voinovich (1932–2018), Leonid Chertkov, Anatoly Gladilin (1935–2018), Anri Volokhonsky (1936–2017), Andrei Bitov (1937–2018), Igor Sinyavin, Alexei Khvostenko, Sergei Dovlatov (1941–1990), Eduard Limonov (1943–2020), and Sasha Sokolov (b.

Since '70s there were such postmodern unofficial movements as Moscow Conceptualists with elements of concrete poetry[109][110] (Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmitry Prigov, writer and literary scholar Viktor Yerofeyev, Lev Rubinstein, Timur Kibirov, early Vladimir Sorokin) and Metarealism, namely metaphysical realism, used complex metaphors which they called meta-metaphors (Konstantin Kedrov, Viktor Krivulin, Elena Katsyuba, Ivan Zhdanov, Elena Shvarts,[111] Vladimir Aristov, Aleksandr Yeryomenko, scholar Svetlana Kekova, Yuri Arabov, Alexei Parshchikov, Sergei Nadeem and Nikolai Kononov).

A notable writer in this vein was Arkady Gaydar (1904–1941), himself a Red Army commander (colonel) in Russian Civil War: his stories and plays about Timur describe a team of young pioneer volunteers who help the elderly and resist hooligans.

Two notable exceptions to this trend were early Soviet dissidents Yevgeny Zamyatin, author of dystopian novel We, and Mikhail Bulgakov, who used science fiction in Heart of a Dog, The Fatal Eggs and Ivan Vasilyevich to satirize Communist ideology vs. what it is actual practice.

Of the rare exceptions, Bulgakov in Master and Margarita (not published in author's lifetime) and Strugatskies in Monday Begins on Saturday introduced magic and mystical creatures into contemporary Soviet reality to satirize it.

1962), disputably related to postmodernism[119] and the New Sincerity movement,[120] who is author of the Zen-inspired Chapayev and the Void, "the first novel which takes place in an absolute vacuum," postmodernist[121] novelist and playwright Vladimir Sorokin (b.

A good share of modern Russian science fiction and fantasy is written in Ukraine, especially in Kharkiv,[125] home to H. L. Oldie, Alexander Zorich, Yuri Nikitin and Andrey Valentinov.

The Moscow Conceptualists and followers of Concrete poetry, such as mentioned Dmitry Prigov, Lev Rubinstein, Anna Alchuk and Timur Kibirov (also novelist and literary scholar Viktor Yerofeyev), and the members of the Lianosovo group of nonconformist poets, notably Genrikh Sapgir, Igor Kholin and Vsevolod Nekrasov, who previously chose to refrain from publication in Soviet periodicals, became very influential, especially in Moscow,[126][110] and the same goes for another masterful experimental neo-surrealist Chuvash and Russian poet, Gennadiy Aygi.

[126] Also popular were poets following some other poetic trends, e.g. members of "neo-Baroque" poetry school (not to be confused with neo-Baroque architecture) Ivan Zhdanov, Elena Shvarts, Aleksandr Yeryomenko and Alexei Parshchikov, Konstantin Kedrov and Elena Katsuba from DOOS, scholar Svetlana Kekova, Sergei Nadeem and Nikolai Kononov from Saratov club Cocoon, Vladimir Aristov, Yuri Arabov and other representatives of the 1970–80s Metarealism, who all used complex metaphors which they called meta-metaphors;[126][114] in St. Petersburg, members of New Leningrad Poetry School that included not only the famous Joseph Brodsky but also Viktor Krivulin, Sergey Stratanovsky and Elena Shvarts, and such members of Philological School as Mikhail Eremin, Leonid Vinogradov, Vladimir Uflyand and the Russian-American scholar Lev Loseff, were prominent first in the Soviet-times underground—and later in mainstream poetry;[102][126] minimalist verse was represented since 1970s by members of List of characters group Mikhail Faynerman, Ivan Akhmetyev and later by Alexander Makarov-Krotkov; in 1992 emerged, the Meloimaginist group related to previous Imaginism and included such poets and novelists as Russian-Irish bilingual Anatoly Kudryavitsky and Ludmila Vaturina; among other names, poets with nonconformist background Russian-Austrian musicolog Elizaveta Mnatsakanova, Galina Andreeva, Leonid Chertkov, Stanislav Krasovitsky, Dmitry Avaliani, Ry Nikonova, economist Yevgeny Saburov, Russian-Israeli author Elena Ignatova, Mikhail Aizenberg, Yevgeny Bunimovich and Dimitry Grigoriev, also poet and writer Nikolaĭ Baĭtov, the Russian-German scholar Sergey Biryukov with futurist and surrealist background,[126] Irina Iermakova, Vitaly Kalpidi, the unable to publish during Soviet years scholar Olga Sedakova, and Boris Khersonsky.