Imperial literature

The first Russian writer to be widely celebrated in the West, Turgenev managed to be hated by the radicals as well as by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky for his dedicated Westernism, bland liberalism, aesthetic elegance, and tendency to nostalgia and self-pity. He first gained fame with his subtle descriptions of peasant life in Zapiski okhotnika (1852; A Sportsman’s Sketches), which contributed to the climate leading to the abolition of serfdom. He is celebrated for his novels about intelligents and ideology: Rudin (1856), Nakanune (1860; On the Eve), and Dym (1867; Smoke). His most distinguished work, Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons), offers both an evenhanded portrait of the radical nihilists and an allegorical meditation on the conflict of generations.

Other prose writers

The mid-19th century produced a number of other fine prose writers. Sergey Aksakov wrote fictionalized reminiscences: Semeynaya khronika (1856; The Family Chronicle) and Detskiye gody Bagrova-vnuka (1858; Years of Childhood). Aleksandr Herzen wrote his greatest works in emigration. In S togo berega (written 1847–50; From the Other Shore), which combines essays and dialogues, he reflects with penetrating skepticism on the idea that history has knowable laws. Herzen’s Byloye i dumy (written 1852–68; My Past and Thoughts) is regarded as the best Russian autobiography. Ivan Goncharov is the author of the comic masterpiece Oblomov (1859), a study of dreamy slothfulness: its hero spends a hundred pages getting out of bed. Nikolay Leskov is remembered for his short stories, including “Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo uyezda” (1865; “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District”), as well as for his novel Soboryane (1872; The Cathedral Folk). Like Gogol before and Mikhail Zoshchenko after him, he was a master of skaz, a written narrative imitating a spontaneous oral account in its use of dialect, slang, or a particular idiom. A radical satirist and (remarkably) a government official who attained general’s rank, Mikhail Saltykov wrote (under the pseudonym N. Shchedrin) the extremely dark novel Gospoda Golovlyovy (1876; The Golovlyov Family), portraying the relentless decline of a family. The agony of an intellectual who wants to merge with the common people and the intimate link of utopianism to madness figure as prominent themes in the short stories of Vsevolod Garshin, including “Khudozhniki” (1879; “Artists”) and “Krasny tsvetok” (1883; “The Red Flower”).

Anton Chekhov

When Tolstoy abandoned the prosaic ethos, Chekhov, one of the greatest short story writers in world literature, remained loyal to it. Indeed, he reinterpreted it within his essentially bourgeois values, stressing the moral necessity of ordinary virtues such as daily kindness, cleanliness, politeness, work, sobriety, paying one’s debts, and avoiding self-pity. Replying to the intelligentsia’s demand for political tendentiousness, which he equated with a stifling intellectual conformity, he maintained that his only “tendency” was a protest against lying in all its forms. In his hundreds of stories and novellas, which he wrote while practicing medicine, Chekhov adopts something of a clinical approach to ordinary life. Meticulous observation and broad sympathy for diverse points of view shape his fiction. In his stories, an overt plot subtly hints at other hidden stories, and so the experience of rereading his fiction often differs substantially from that produced by a first reading. Especially noteworthy are “Skuchnaya istoriya” (written 1889; “A Dreary Story”), “Duel” (written 1891; “The Duel”), “Palata No. 6” (written 1892; “Ward Number Six”), “Kryzhovnik” (written 1898; “Gooseberries”), “Dushechka” (written 1899; “The Darling”), “Dama s sobachkoy” (written 1899; “The Lady with the Lap Dog”), “Arkhiyerey” (written 1902; “The Bishop”), and “Nevesta” (written 1903; “The Betrothed”).

Along with Gogol’s The Inspector General, Chekhov’s plays are the high point of Russian drama. In his four great plays, Chayka (1896; The Seagull), Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya), Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), Chekhov’s belief that life is lived at ordinary moments and that histrionics are a dangerous lie found expression in a major innovation, the undramatic drama—or, as it is sometimes called, the theatre of inaction.

Symbolists

The Symbolists saw art as a way to approach a higher reality. The first wave of Symbolists included Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), who translated a number of English poets and wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first inspiration); Valery Bryusov (1873–1924), a poet and translator of French Symbolist verse and of Virgil’s Aeneid, who for years was the leader of the movement; Zinaida Gippius (1869–1945), who wrote decadent, erotic, and religious poetry; and Fyodor Sologub, author of melancholic verse and of a novel, Melky bes (1907; The Petty Demon), about a sadistic, homicidal, paranoid schoolteacher.

Three writers dominate the second wave of Symbolism. Eschatology and anthroposophy shaped the poetry and prose of Andrey Bely, whose novel Peterburg (1913–22; St. Petersburg) is regarded as the masterpiece of Symbolist fiction. Aleksandr Blok, who wrote the lyric drama Balaganchik (1906; “The Showbooth”), is best known for his poem Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve), which describes 12 brutal Red Guards who turn out to be unwittingly led by Jesus Christ. The principal theoretician of the Symbolist movement, Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist philosophy.

Acmeists and Futurists

In the second decade of the 20th century, Symbolism was challenged by two other schools, the Acmeists, who favoured clarity over metaphysical vagueness, and the brash Futurists, who wanted to throw all earlier and most contemporary poetry “from the steamship of modernity.” Among the Acmeists, Nikolay Gumilyov (1886–1921), who stressed poetic craftsmanship over the occult, was executed by the Bolsheviks. Already an accomplished creator of superb love lyrics in these years, Anna Akhmatova produced densely and brilliantly structured poems in the Soviet period, including Poema bez geroya (written 1940–62; A Poem Without a Hero) and Rekviyem (written 1935–40; Requiem), which was inspired by Soviet purges and was therefore unpublishable in Russia. From 1923 to 1940 she was forced into silence, and in 1946 Akhmatova and Zoshchenko became the target of official abuse by the Communist Party cultural spokesman Andrey Zhdanov (1896–1948). Some consider Osip Mandelshtam (1891–1938), who died in a Soviet prison camp, to be the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century. Many of his difficult, allusive poems were preserved by his wife, Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899–1980), whose memoirs are themselves a classic.

The two most important Futurist poets were Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through numerology and developed amazingly implausible theories about language and its origins. His verse, which is characterized by neologisms and “trans-sense” language, includes “Zaklyatiye smekhom” (1910; “Incantation by Laughter”) and Zangezi (1922). Mayakovsky epitomized the spirit of romantic bohemian radicalism. Humour, bravado, and self-pity characterize his inventive long poems, including Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers). After the Russian Revolution in 1917, which he ardently supported initially, Mayakovsky “stepped on the throat” of his song to produce propaganda poems. But he also satirized Soviet bureaucracy in the witty “Razgovor s fininspektorom o poezii” (1926; “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry”). As a dramatist, he is best known for Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), in which he played the lead role, and Klop (1929; The Bedbug), in which a philistine, along with a bedbug, is resurrected into the banal communist future of 1979. Having written a poem about the suicide of the peasant poet Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925), Mayakovsky later shot himself, leaving a brilliantly ironic suicide note with a poem explaining that “love’s boat has smashed against daily life.”

Others

Celebrated in their day, the fiction writers Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919), Aleksandr Kuprin (1870–1938), and Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) now have faded reputations. But Ivan Bunin, who became the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), wrote superb works both before the Revolution and as an émigré after it. Especially noteworthy are his dark novella Derevnya (1910; The Village), which is relentlessly critical of Russians, and his Zhizn Arsenyeva (1930; The Life of Arseniev, or The Well of Days), a fictionalized autobiography. Maxim Gorky became the official founder of Socialist Realism. Western readers now appreciate his three-volume autobiography Detstvo (1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915–16; In the World, or My Apprenticeship), and Moi universitety (1923; My Universities) and his Vospominaniya o Lve Nikolayeviche Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy). His highly tendentious novel Mat (1906; Mother), a model for Socialist Realism, and many other works divide characters simplistically into two groups—progressive and virtuous or reactionary and vicious.