Curated playlist
20th-century Russian male writers
- Alexander BlokAlexander Alexandrovich Blok heard something in the summer of 1917 that most people could not. Writing in his diary, he recorded: "I feel that a great event was coming, but what it was exactly was not revealed to me." That sentence…
- Bulat OkudzhavaBulat Okudzhava was born in Moscow on the 9th of May 1924, into a family that had traveled from Tbilisi to serve the Communist Party. His father held high rank. His uncle had tried to assassinate a governor. A cousin of sorts rode the…
- Andrei TarkovskyAndrei Tarkovsky was born on the 4th of April 1932 in the village of Zavrazhye, a small settlement in what is now the Kostroma Oblast of Russia. He would go on to direct just seven feature films in his lifetime. Yet Ingmar Bergman, one of…
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those heavens from a cell in the Lubyanka prison. He had been arrested three months earlier,…
- Andrei BelyAndrei Bely was born Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev in Moscow, into a household where intellectual life was the air everyone breathed. His father, Nikolai Bugaev, was a mathematician regarded as a founder of the Moscow school of mathematics. His…
- Eldar RyazanovEldar Ryazanov was born on the 18th of November 1927, in Samara, to a diplomat father and a Jewish mother, in a country that would spend the next several decades reshaping itself by force. His father, Aleksandr Semyonovich Ryazanov, was…
- Mikhail BulgakovMikhail Bulgakov typed the last pages of The Master and Margarita knowing they would likely never be read. In a letter to his wife on the 15th of June 1938, he described 327 manuscript pages, roughly 22 chapters, waiting on his desk. He…
- Peter KropotkinPeter Kropotkin was born in Moscow on the 9th of December 1842, in the Konyushennaya district, which translates as the Equerries district. His father owned serfs in three provinces. His family descended from the princes of Smolensk. By the…
- Vladimir MayakovskyVladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and then the suspicions began. The bullet pulled from his body did not match the model of his pistol. Neighbors reported hearing two shots, not one. Ten days…
- Sergei YeseninSergei Yesenin was found dead on the 28th of December 1925 in his room at the Hotel Angleterre in Leningrad. He was thirty years old. The day before, he had cut his wrist and used his own blood to write a farewell poem. That poem,…
- Nikolay LosskyNikolay Onufriyevich Lossky once summed up his entire philosophy in four words: 'all is immanent in all'. He called the system built from that idea intuitive-personalism. It was a way of thinking about reality that put him at odds with the…
- Boris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the kitchen door waiting to rush illustrations to a literary journal in St. Petersburg.…
- 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…
- 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…
- Victor PelevinVictor Pelevin was born in Moscow on the 22nd of November 1962, the son of an English teacher and a military department instructor at Bauman University. He grew up on Tverskoy Boulevard, graduated from an elite high school with a special…
- Sergey MikhalkovSergey Mikhalkov wrote the words that hundreds of millions of Soviet citizens heard every morning, every sporting event, every state occasion for decades. He was, for most of his life, Russia's most beloved children's poet. Yet he was also…
- Ivan BuninIvan Alekseyevich Bunin became the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy gave it to him in 1933, while he was living as an exile in France. On the 10th of November that year, Paris newspapers ran…
- Vladimir SorokinVladimir Sorokin was born on the 7th of August 1955 in Bykovo, a district of Moscow Oblast, and he went on to become one of the most provocative literary voices in contemporary Russian writing. He trained not as a writer but as an…
- Konstantin BalmontKonstantin Balmont once sent Leo Tolstoy a copy of his most celebrated book with a letter that read: "This book is a prolonged scream of a soul caught in the process of being torn apart." That sentence captures something essential about a…