Short answers, pulled from the story.
Russian literature is the literature of Russia, its emigres, and Russian-language literature. It includes bilingual writers such as the Kyrgyz novelist Chinghiz Aitmatov and Vasil Bykau, who wrote in Belarusian but translated his works into Russian. It excludes authors who write primarily in the native languages of indigenous non-Russian ethnic groups, so the Dagestani poet Rasul Gamzatov is omitted.
The Golden Age refers to the 19th century, traditionally called the "Golden Era" of Russian literature. Alexander Pushkin is credited with crystallizing the literary Russian language, and his best-known work is the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, from 1833. The era produced Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov.
The Silver Age of Russian poetry ran through the 1890s and the beginning of the 20th century. The poets most often associated with it are Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak. It began with Russian symbolism in the 1890s and included movements such as Acmeism, Cubo-Futurism and Ego-Futurism.
Socialist realism became the predominant official trend in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. Maxim Gorky was proclaimed its founder and defined it as the "realism of people who are rebuilding the world." Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered, written from 1932 to 1934, became one of its most standard works, with more than 35 million copies in circulation in Russia.
Russia has five Nobel Prize in Literature laureates. Among them are Ivan Bunin, Boris Pasternak, who was forced to renounce his 1958 prize, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the gulag camps.
The oldest dated manuscript of early Russian and all-Slavic literature is the Novgorod Codex, also called the Novgorod Psalter, written around the year 1000 and unearthed in 2000 at Veliky Novgorod. It contains four wooden tablet pages filled with wax. The Ostromir Gospels, written in 1056 to 1057, count among the earliest Russian books.
After 2022, almost all of the prominent contemporary Russian authors who criticized Putinism had left Russia, and they were "canceled" with their books withdrawn from a number of Russian booksellers. Active supporters of the political regime among eminent writers include the poet Yunna Morits and the nationalists Alexander Prokhanov and Zakhar Prilepin.