Russian literature

• 1. The World's Most Reading Nation

  ›

  A folk saying calls Russians "the world's most reading nation." The American scholar Gary Saul Morson put it more flatly. "No country has ever valued literature more than Russia." By 2011, Russia stood as the fourth largest book producer in the world, measured by published titles. Five of its writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet this is a tradition that began not with novels but with wax tablets and birch bark, and one that would later force some of its greatest voices into exile, into prison, or into silence. How did a literature rooted in a borrowed liturgical language grow into one of the most renowned in the world? And why did the same country that guaranteed universal literacy also build a machine of ideological censorship around its writers? The answers run from a psalter unearthed at Veliky Novgorod to novelists "canceled" and withdrawn from booksellers after 2022.

• 2. Tablets And Birch Bark

  ›

  Old Church Slavonic arrived in Kievan Rus' as a liturgical language in the late 10th century, following Christianization. From it grew a written "bookish" literature. The oldest dated manuscript of this early Russian and all-Slavic tradition is the Novgorod Codex, also called the Novgorod Psalter, written around the year 1000 and unearthed in 2000 at Veliky Novgorod. It holds four wooden tablet pages filled with wax. The Ostromir Gospels, written in 1056 to 1057, count among the earliest Russian books, part of a set of liturgical texts translated from other languages. Alongside these sacred works ran a practical written vernacular. Decrees, laws such as the Russkaya Pravda, and the birch bark manuscripts of the 11th to 15th centuries in the Old Novgorod dialect all used everyday Old Russian. Chronicles, most of them anonymous, formed the main type of historical literature. The oldest is the Primary Chronicle, also called the Tale of Nestor the Chronicler, from around 1115, surviving in the Laurentian Codex of 1377 and the Hypatian Codex of the 1420s. The medieval canon included anonymous masterpieces. The Tale of Igor's Campaign, a 12th century prose poem, sits among them. Hagiographies thrived as a genre, and Nestor the Chronicler wrote of Boris and Gleb, the first saints of Kievan Rus'. The Life of Alexander Nevsky blended political realism with hagiographic ideal, while The Tale of the Destruction of Ryazan recalled the havoc of the Mongol invasions. By the second half of the 17th century, a Russian Baroque took shape, driven by tsar Alexis, who wanted a court theatre in 1672. Its director and playwright, the German-Russian pastor Johann Gottfried Gregorii, wrote the 10-hour play The Action of Artaxerxes.

• 3. Peter's Language Wars

  ›

  Peter the Great took the throne at the end of the 17th century, and his modernizing reforms reached far into the 18th. Russian writers began to argue, in earnest, about how their own language should be used and shaped. The satirist Antiokh Kantemir, who lived from 1708 to 1744, praised Peter directly in his epic Petrida. He also attacked what he called Russia's "superficiality and obscurantism," and opened a decade-long debate on syllabic versification. Vasily Trediakovsky changed the course of that argument with his translation of Paul Tallemant's Voyage to the Isle of Love. It was the first to use the Russian vernacular instead of formal Church Slavonic, setting a precedent that secular works could be written in everyday speech while sacred texts stayed in Church Slavonic. Alexander Sumarokov, who lived from 1717 to 1777, was a rival to Trediakovsky and devoted to French classicism. In his manifesto Epistle on Poetry, he wrote, "The great Peter hurls his thunder from the Baltic shores, the Russian sword glitters in all corners of the universe." Mikhail Lomonosov took a different path, favoring a hierarchy of literary styles divided into high, middle and low. Under Catherine the Great, the themes grew more political and dangerous. Alexander Radishchev shocked the public with his depiction of the condition of the serfs, and Empress Catherine II forced him into exile in Siberia. Gavrila Derzhavin, famous for his odes, dedicated poems to the same empress and served as her secretary and as Minister of Justice. Nikolay Karamzin, who lived from 1766 to 1826, became the key figure of Russian sentimentalism and urged male writers to write with a heightened, then considered feminine, sense of emotion.

• 4. The Golden Era

  ›

  The 19th century earned the name the "Golden Era" of Russian literature. Alexander Pushkin, protege of the poet Vasily Zhukovsky, is credited with crystallizing the literary Russian language. His best-known work is the novel in verse Eugene Onegin, from 1833. Fyodor Tyutchev gave the era one of its most quoted verses, beginning "Who would grasp Russia with the mind? For her no yardstick was created." Mikhail Lermontov wrote the narrative poem Demon between 1829 and 1839, tracing a Byronic Demon's love for a mortal woman. His A Hero of Our Time, from 1841, is often called the first Russian psychological novel. As Romanticism held the stage, Realism began to flower. The first great rich-language Russian novel was Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol, in 1842. Ivan Goncharov is remembered mainly for Oblomov, from 1859. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy grew so renowned that scholars such as F. R. Leavis named them among the greatest novelists of all time. Tolstoy's Christian anarchism shows in his lament that "Only men, grown-up men, continued cheating and tormenting themselves and each other." Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote the satirical chronicle The History of a Town in 1870 and the family saga The Golovlyov Family in 1880. Nikolai Leskov is remembered for his shorter fiction and his skaz technique, an oral form of narrative stylization. Late in the century, Anton Chekhov became a master of the short story and a leading international dramatist.

• 5. Silver And Avant-Garde

  ›

  The 1890s opened the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Russian symbolism came first, arising fairly separately from West European symbolism and emphasizing the mysticism of Sophiology and defamiliarization. Its figures included the philosopher and poet Vladimir Solovyov, who lived from 1853 to 1900, along with Valery Bryusov, Fyodor Sologub, Konstantin Balmont, and the new wave of Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, both born in 1880. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak are the poets most often tied to the age. Acmeism, a modernist school that emerged around 1911, preferred direct expression through exact images over symbols. Some poets tried instead to overturn the Golden Age tradition. The Cubo-Futurists practiced zaum, an experimental visual and sound poetry, through David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Igor Severyanin and Vasilisk Gnedov built Ego-Futurism around a personality cult. The era was famous for poetry, yet it also produced novelists, among them the naturalist Aleksandr Kuprin and the Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin. In 1915 and 1916 the school of Russian Formalism appeared, wary of the futurists. Its programmatic article, The Resurrection of the Word by Viktor Shklovsky, who lived from 1893 to 1984, was published in 1914, and the movement peaked in the 1920s. Russian philosophy reached its own peak at this time, through Nikolai Berdyaev, Pavel Florensky and others.

• 6. Steel And Censorship

  ›

  After the Russian Revolution of 1917, literature split into Soviet and white emigre parts. The Soviet Union assured universal literacy and a developed book printing industry. It also established ideological censorship. In the 1930s, Socialist realism became the predominant official trend. Maxim Gorky, who returned from emigration, was proclaimed "the founder of Socialist Realism" and defined it as the "realism of people who are rebuilding the world." He became the initiator of the Writer's Union, the state organization meant to unite the new movement's writers. Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered, written from 1932 to 1934, became one of the most standard works of the style, with tens of millions of copies printed in many languages. In China, various versions sold more than 10 million copies, and in Russia more than 35 million copies are in circulation. The book is a fictionalized autobiography. Ostrovsky became a Komsomol member in July 1919 and volunteered for the Red Army, and his protagonist Pavel Korchagin became the "young hero" of Russian literature. Mikhail Sholokhov, who lived from 1905 to 1984, wrote the collectivization novel Virgin Soil Upturned in 1935. His most significant achievement was the epic Quiet Flows the Don, depicting Don Cossacks across the First World War, the Revolution and the Civil War. Other writers were treated as enemies. Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, and Andrei Platonov, author of Chevengur and The Foundation Pit, were attacked as "formalists" and "naturalists" and wrote with little hope of publication. Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak and Nikolai Klyuev were executed on fabricated charges. Osip Mandelstam, Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky died in prison.

• 7. Exile And The Gulag

  ›

  Boris Pasternak, who lived from 1890 to 1960, wrote Doctor Zhivago between 1945 and 1955, and its publication in Italy caused a scandal. The Soviet authorities forced him to renounce his 1958 Nobel Prize, denounced him as a White emigre and a "Fascist fifth columnist," and expelled him from the Writer's Union. Some writers opposed Soviet ideology head-on. Varlam Shalamov, who lived from 1907 to 1982, and the Nobel Prize-winning Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived from 1918 to 2008, wrote about life in the gulag camps. Vasily Grossman countered official historiography of the Second World War, and his epic Life and Fate, from 1959, was not published in the Soviet Union until perestroika. The Khrushchev Thaw, around 1954, brought fresh air. The term itself came from Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 novel The Thaw. In 1962, Solzhenitsyn's debut story One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about a political prisoner, became a national and international sensation. Poetry turned into a mass-cultural phenomenon, as Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesensky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko read in stadiums to huge crowds. The thaw did not hold. In the 1970s, prominent authors were banned, prosecuted for anti-Soviet sentiment or for parasitism. Yuli Daniel and Leonid Borodin were imprisoned. Solzhenitsyn and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky were expelled from the country. Banned books were reprinted by hand in a practice called "samizdat," self-publishing, until they could appear officially during perestroika.

• 8. After The Soviet Word

  ›

  The end of the 20th century proved difficult, with few distinct voices, as glasnost lifted censorship in 1990 but the chaos of the decade battered the book market. The number of printed copies dropped several times below Soviet levels, and recovery took about a decade. Victor Pelevin, born in 1962, drew wide discussion with the Zen-inspired Chapayev and the Void, called "the first novel which takes place in an absolute vacuum." Vladimir Sorokin, born in 1955, wrote Blue Lard and had begun an underground career in the early 1980s. The conceptualist poet Dmitry Prigov, who lived from 1940 to 2007, belonged to the same period. Genre fiction surged. In the 1990s, serial detective novels by Alexandra Marinina, Polina Dashkova and Darya Dontsova sold in the millions, and Boris Akunin later won readers with his 19th-century sleuth Erast Fandorin. A relatively new trend brought female short-story writers and novelists to prominence, among them Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Tatyana Tolstaya. In the 21st century, a new generation led critics to speak of "new realism" as a contemporary trend, including Roman Senchin and Zakhar Prilepin. Eugene Vodolazkin, born in 1964, earned acclaim for Laurus, named by The Guardian among ten best world novels about God. Two new prizes, the Big Book and the National Bestseller, gained influence. Almost all of the named authors criticized Putinism and left Russia. After 2022, they were "canceled," and their books were withdrawn from a number of Russian booksellers, while supporters of the regime such as Alexander Prokhanov and Zakhar Prilepin remained.