Curated category
19th-century novelists from the Russian Empire
- Fyodor DostoevskyFyodor Dostoevsky stood in Semyonov Place in Saint Petersburg on the 23rd of December 1849, waiting to be shot. He had been split into a three-man group with…
- Leo TolstoyLeo Tolstoy spent the last hours of his life on a train, preaching love, non-violence, and Georgism to fellow passengers, before pneumonia stopped him at a…
- Ivan TurgenevIvan Turgenev had a brain that weighed 2,012 grams, one of the largest ever recorded. The man who carried it was tall and broad-shouldered, yet timid…
- Mikhail LermontovMikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814.
- Maxim GorkyMaxim Gorky was born Alexei Maximovich Peshkov in Nizhny Novgorod, and by the time he died in June 1936, his ashes were carried through Moscow by Joseph…
- Alexander HerzenAlexander Herzen was born in Moscow in 1812, just weeks before Napoleon's armies marched into the city. His very name was invented by his father, a rich…
- Nikolai LeskovNikolai Semyonovich Leskov died on the 5th of March 1895, and his funeral was held in silence. He had written the instruction into his will in December 1892…
- Leonid AndreyevLeonid Andreyev sold a quarter-million copies of his debut short-story collection in 1901, making him an overnight literary star in Russia.
- Nikolay KaramzinNikolay Karamzin once said his surname traced back to a baptized Tatar called Kara-mirza, an ancestor so distant that no records survived his name.
- Mikhail Saltykov-ShchedrinMikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin was the kind of writer whose very name became a language. By the end of his life, critics spoke of a prose style so distinctive…
- Nikolay NekrasovNikolay Nekrasov was the Russian poet who turned a funeral into a political uprising. On the 8th of January 1878, four thousand people followed his coffin to…