Curated playlist
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 the firing squad before him, the third man in the second row. Beside him stood…
- 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 small railway station. He was born Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy in 1828, into old…
- 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, restrained, and soft-spoken. He was a Russian novelist, short story writer, poet,…
- Mikhail LermontovMikhail Yuryevich Lermontov was a Russian Romantic writer, poet and painter, born in Moscow on the 15th of October 1814. Russians sometimes called him the poet of the Caucasus. After Alexander Pushkin died in 1837, many regarded Lermontov…
- 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 Stalin himself. Between those two facts lies a life of extraordinary contradiction: a…
- 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 Russian landowner named Ivan Yakovlev, who derived it from the German word Herz,…
- 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: no speeches over his body. "I know I have many bad things in me and do not…
- Leonid AndreyevLeonid Andreyev sold a quarter-million copies of his debut short-story collection in 1901, making him an overnight literary star in Russia. He wrote 25 plays, published explosive fiction that caused public commotion, and became a household…
- 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. That story tells you something important about Karamzin himself: he was a man who searched…
- 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 they called it 'saltykovian.' A man who spent decades as a government official, who…
- 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 the Novodevichy Cemetery in Saint Petersburg. The procession did not stay solemn…