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Curated playlist

Male poets from the Russian Empire

  • Alexander BlokAlexander Blok wrote a poem likening Bolshevik soldiers to the Twelve Apostles of Christ.
  • Alexander PushkinAlexander Pushkin could not speak Russian well until he was ten years old. He grew up speaking mostly French.
  • Sergei YeseninPoet Sergei Yesenin wrote his farewell poem in his own blood. He was found dead in a Leningrad hotel room at thirty.
  • Ivan TurgenevIvan Turgenev wrote an obituary for Nikolai Gogol and was jailed for a month. Censors had banned it in Saint Petersburg.
  • Denis FonvizinLines from Denis Fonvizin's comedies became Russian proverbs. He wrote them under a powerful nobleman's protection.
  • Boris PasternakBoris Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, then his government forced him to decline it.
  • Maxim GorkyWriter Maxim Gorky visited a Soviet labor camp that had been staged for him, and he did not notice.
  • Ivan KrylovIvan Krylov found his calling as a fable writer only at age 40.
  • Vasily ZhukovskyScholars cite Vasily Zhukovsky's 1802 translation of an English elegy as Russian Romanticism's starting point.
  • Ivan BuninExiled in France, Ivan Bunin became the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
  • Mikhail LomonosovMikhail Lomonosov sealed metals in glass vessels in 1756 and found their mass did not change.
  • Nikolay KaramzinNikolay Karamzin spent years writing a 12-volume history of Russia. He died before finishing it.
  • Aleksey Konstantinovich TolstoyCount Aleksey Tolstoy co-created Kozma Prutkov, a fake poet many readers thought was real.
  • Dmitry MerezhkovskyDmitry Merezhkovsky's ruined reputation rests on a 1941 radio speech his biographer believes Nazis fabricated.
  • Nikolay NekrasovPoet Nikolay Nekrasov's funeral turned into a political rally. Four thousand people followed his coffin in 1878.
  • Afanasy FetPoet Afanasy Fet died in 1892 with a paper knife in his hand and a suicide note on the table.
  • Gavrila DerzhavinA bureaucratic error made Gavrila Derzhavin a soldier instead of an engineer. He still rose to Minister of Justice.
  • Konstantin BalmontPoet Konstantin Balmont burned every leftover copy of his own first book after it flopped.
  • Fyodor TyutchevFyodor Tyutchev called his poems trifles and often lost the scraps of paper they were written on.

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