Baked goods are ubiquitous on Easter, including round-shaped sweet bread and Easter cake. Traditionally, pashka, a mixture of sweetened curds, butter, and raisins, is served with the cake. Hard-boiled eggs painted in bright colours also are staples of the Easter holiday.
The Red Hill holiday is observed on the first Sunday after Easter and is considered the best day for wedding ceremonies. In summer the Russian celebration of Ivan Kupalo (St. John the Baptist) centres on water, and celebrants commonly picnic or watch fireworks from riverbanks.
Another popular traditional holiday is the Troitsa (Pentecost), during which homes are adorned with fresh green branches. Girls often make garlands of birch branches and flowers to put into water for fortune-telling. In the last month of summer, there is a cluster of three folk holidays—known collectively as the Spas—that celebrate honey and the sowing of the apple and nut crops, respectively.
Russia also has several official holidays, including the Russian Orthodox Christmas (January 7), Victory Day in World War II (May 9), Independence Day (June 12), and Constitution Day (December 12). Women's Day (March 8), formerly known as International Women's Day and celebrated elsewhere in the world by its original name, was established by Soviet authorities to highlight the advances women made under communist rule. During the holiday women usually receive gifts such as flowers and chocolates.
Although a wide array of imported packaged products are now found in Russian cities, traditional foods and ingredients remain popular, including cabbage, potatoes, carrots, sour cream, and apples—the principal ingredients of borsch, the famous Russian soup made with beets. Normally, Russians prefer to finish their daily meals with a cup of tea or coffee (the latter more common in the larger cities). Also popular is kvass, a traditional beverage that can be made at home from stale black bread. On a hot summer day, chilled kvass is used to makeokroshka, a traditional cold soup laced with cucumbers, boiled eggs, sausages, and salamis.
vodka, the national drink of Russia, accompanies many family meals, especially on special occasions. The basic vodkas have no additional flavouring, but they are sometimes infused with cranberries, lemon peel, pepper, or herbs. Vodka is traditionally consumed straight and is chased by a fatty salt herring, a sour cucumber, a pickled mushroom, or a piece of rye bread with butter. It is considered bad manners and a sign of weak character to become visibly intoxicated from vodka.
The growth of the Russian middle class has generated dramatic changes in Russia's lifestyles and social customs. Travel abroad has become popular, and consumption, particularly of imported luxury goods, has increased. Many wealthy individuals have purchased private land and built second homes, often of two or three stories. Russia's middle class has adopted values that are distinctly different from Soviet practice. The new values include self-reliance and viewing work as source of joy and pride; the middle class also tends to avoid political extremes, to participate in charitable organizations, and to patronize theatres and restaurants. Estimates of the size of the middle class vary (as do definitions of it), but it is generally assumed that it constitutes about one-fourth of Russian society, and much of that is concentrated in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other urban areas.
The rebirth of religion is another dimension of the changed lifestyles of new Russia. Although a majority of Russians are nonbelievers, religious institutions have filled the vacuum created by the downfall of communist ideology, and even many nonbelievers participate in the now-ubiquitous religious festivities.
The arts
Literature (Russian literature)
The 19th century
The first quarter of the 19th century was dominated by Romantic poetry. Vasily Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich)'s 1802 translation of Thomas Gray (Gray, Thomas)'sAn Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (elegy) ushered in a vogue for the personal, elegiac mode that was soon amplified in the work of Konstantin Batyushkov (Batyushkov, Konstantin Nikolayevich), Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, and the young Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich). Although there was a call for civic-oriented poetry in the late 1810s and early '20s, most of the strongest poets followed Zhukovsky's lyrical path. However, in the 1820s the mature Pushkin went his own way, producing a series of masterpieces that laid the foundation for his eventual recognition as Russia's national poet (the equivalent of William Shakespeare (Shakespeare, William) for English readers or Dante for Italians). Pushkin's works include the Byronic long poems The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820–21) and The Gypsies (1824), the novel in verse Yevgeny Onegin (published 1833), and the Shakespearean tragedy Boris Godunov (1831), as well as exquisite lyrical verse. Pushkin's poetry is remarkable for its classical balance, brilliant and frequently witty use of the Russian literary language, and philosophical content.
During the 1830s a gradual decline in poetry and a rise of prose took place, a shift that coincided with a change in literary institutions. The aristocratic salon, which had been the seedbed for Russian literature, was gradually supplanted by the monthly “thick journals,” the editors and critics of which became Russia's tastemakers. The turn to prose was signaled in the work of Pushkin, whose Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin (1831), The Queen of Spades (1834), and The Captain's Daughter (1836) all appeared before his death in 1837. Also in the 1830s the first publications appeared by Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay), a comic writer of Ukrainian origin, whose grotesquely hilarious oeuvre includes the story The Nose, the play The Government Inspector (both 1836), and the epic novel Dead Souls (1842). Although Gogol was then known primarily as a satirist, he is now appreciated as a verbal magician whose works seem akin to the absurdists of the 20th century. One final burst of poetic energy appeared in the late 1830s in the verse of Mikhail Lermontov (Lermontov, Mikhail), who also wrote A Hero of Our Time (1840), the first Russian psychological novel.
In the 1840s the axis of Russian literature shifted decisively from the personal and Romantic to the civic and realistic (realism), a shift presided over by the great Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich). Belinsky desired a literature primarily concerned with current social problems, although he never expected it to give up the aesthetic function entirely. By the end of the 1840s, Belinsky's ideas had triumphed. Early works of Russian realism include Ivan Goncharov (Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich)'s antiromantic novelA Common Story (1847) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor)'s Poor Folk (1846).