Russian literary history in the twentieth century was characterized by major upheavals. The 1917 Revolution and the Bolshevik coup later in the same year created the first major divide between the imperial and post-revolutionary periods, eventually turning "official" Russian literature into political propaganda for the communist state. Mikhail Gorbachev's ascent to power in 1985 and the collapse of the USSR in 1991 marked the second dramatic break, this time between the post- revolutionary and post-Soviet periods. These breaks were sudden rather than gradual and were the product of political forces external to literary history itself.
However, the cross-over period from the 1890s to 1917 was a time of revival, ushering in a new era of Russian poetry and drama, a "Silver Age" that rivalled, and in some respects surpassed, the Pushkinian "Golden Age". In literature generally this was a time of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism, aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism, eroticism, Marxism, apocalypticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements combined with each other in improbable ways. The civic orientation that had dominated Russian literature since the 1840s was, for the moment, abandoned. The avant-garde's new cry was "art for art's sake", and the new idols were the French symbolists. The symbolists saw art as a way to approach a higher reality. The first wave of symbolists included Konstantin Balmont, who wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first inspiration); Valery Bryusov, who for years was the leader of the movement; Zinaida Gippius, who wrote decadent, erotic, and religious poetry; and Fyodor Sologub, author
Cathedra! of St Basil the Blessed in Red Square, Moscow, Constructed between 1554 and 1560 by Ivan the Terrible as a votive offering for his military victories over the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan.
Red Square, Moscow. Dating from the late fifteenth century, Red Square (Krasnaya Ploshchad) adjoins the Kremlin, Russia's centre of government. It has long been a focal point in the social and political history of Russia and the former Soviet Union. It has had several names, but the present name has been used consistently since the later seventeenth century, 'lhe Russian word krasnaya (now translated as "red") also means "beautiful".
Catherine the Great (1729-96). German- horn empress of Russia who reigned from 1762 and led her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe, carrying on the work begun by Peter the Great. With her ministers she reorganized the administration and law of the Russian Empire and extended Russian territory.
Gallery in the Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, the Hermitage adjoined the Winter Palace and served as a private gallery for the art amassed by the empress. It was opened to the public in 1852. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the imperial collections became public property.
Demonstrators gathering in front of the Winter Palace in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in January 1917, shortly before the Russian Revolution.
Monument to the Third International, 1920. The most famous work of Ukrainian artist Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953), this was one of the first buildings conceived entirely in abstract terms and would have been the world's tallest structure at more than 1,300 feet (396 m) tall. The striking design consisted of a leaning spiral iron framework supporting a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube, each of which could be rotated at different Speeds. It was never built.
Soviet leader Vladimir Iliych Lenin (1870-1924) addressing a crowd in 1920. Lenin was founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the architect and first head (1917-24) of the Soviet state. Lenin was the posthumous source of "Leninism", the doctrine codified and conjoined with Karl Marx's works by Lenin's successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the communist wo rid view.
Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). Secretary-general of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922-53) and premier of the Soviet state (1941-53), Stalin dictatorially ruled the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century and transformed it into a major world power.
Aleksandr Pushkin (17991837). Russian poet, novelist, dramatist, and short-story writer, Pushkin has often been considered his country's greatest poet and the founder of modern Russian literature. His masterpiece, the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (1833), is considered by many to be the first great Russian novel.
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Russian author, a master of realistic fiction, and one of the world's greatest novelists, Tolstoy is best known for his two longest works, War and Peace (1865-9) and Anna Karenina (1875-7), which are commonly regarded as among the finest novels ever written.
Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) with companion Olga Iwinskaja and their daughter Irina in the late 1950s. Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 but aroused so much opposition in the Soviet Union that he declined the honour. An epic of wandering, spiritual isolation and love amid the harshness of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the novel became an international bestseller but circulated only in secrecy and translation in his own land.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (19182008). Russian novelist and historian who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 following the publication, in Paris, of The Gulag Archipelago, a literary-historical record of the vast system of prisons and labour camps that came into being shortly after the Bolsheviks seized power and that underwent an enormous expansion under Stalin.
Yury Gagarin (1934-68), Soviet cosmonaut who in 1961 became the first man to travel into space. His spaceflight brought him immediate worldwide fame; he was awarded the Order of Lenin and given the titles of Hero of the Soviet Union and Pilot Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union,
Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931) on a state visit to Poland. General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 and president of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. His efforts to democratize his country's political system and decentralize its economy led to the downfall of communism and the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Gorbachev was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1990,
Vladimir Putin (b. 1952). Russian intelligence officer and politician who served as president of Russia (1999-2008) and was also the country's prime minister in 1999 and again from 2008.
of melancholic verse and of a novel about a sadistic, homicidal, paranoid schoolteacher. The second wave was dominated by Andrey Bely, whose novel St Petersburg (1913-22) is regarded as the masterpiece of symbolist fiction; Aleksandr Blok, whose best-known work is the poem The Twelve, which describes 12 brutal Red Guards who turn out to be unwittingly led by Jesus Christ; and the principal theoretician of the symbolist movement, Vyacheslav Ivanov, who wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist philosophy.