Curated category
Male poets from the Russian Empire
- 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…
- Alexander PushkinAlexander Sergeyevich Pushkin could not speak Russian well until he was ten years old. The boy who would become the father of Russian literature grew up…
- 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.
- 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…
- Denis FonvizinDenis Ivanovich Fonvizin wrote comedies so sharp that lines from them became Russian proverbs. That is a rare distinction in any literature.
- Boris PasternakBoris Leonidovich Pasternak grew up in a Moscow household where Leo Tolstoy visited, Sergei Rachmaninoff played piano, and train conductors stood at the…
- 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…
- Ivan KrylovIvan Andreyevich Krylov did not discover his true calling until he was 40 years old. By then he had already tried his hand at comedy writing, journalism…
- Vasily ZhukovskyVasily Zhukovsky composed the words that Russians sang as their national anthem for decades, yet he spent much of his career translating other people's poems.
- 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…
- Mikhail LomonosovMikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was born in a small village on an island in the frozen north of Russia, the son of a peasant fisherman who hauled cargo to…
- 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.
- Aleksey Konstantinovich TolstoyCount Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy died on the 28th of September 1875 at his Krasny Rog estate, having administered a lethal dose of morphine to himself.
- Dmitry MerezhkovskyDmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature nine times and never won it. He co-founded Russian Symbolism, helped invent…
- 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…
- Afanasy FetAfanasy Fet died on the 21st of November 1892 with a paper knife in his hand and a suicide note on the table. His secretary had just wrestled the blade away…
- Gavrila DerzhavinGavrila Derzhavin was born on the 14th of July 1743 into a family that had once held profitable estates along the Myosha River but had lost nearly everything…
- 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…
- Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev wrote roughly 400 short poems across his entire life, yet he rarely bothered to write them down. When he did, he frequently lost the scraps…