From the 1840s until the turn of the 20th century, the realist novel dominated Russian literature, though it was by no means a monolithic movement. In the early period the favoured method was the “physiological sketch,” which often depicted a typical member of the downtrodden classes; quintessential examples are found in Ivan Turgenev (Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich)'s 1852 collection A Sportsman's Sketches. In these beautifully crafted stories, Turgenev describes the life of Russian serfs (serfdom) as seen through the eyes of a Turgenev-like narrator; indeed, his powerful artistic depiction was credited with convincing Tsar Alexander II of the need to emancipate the serfs. Turgenev followed Sketches with a series of novels, each of which was felt by contemporaries to have captured the essence of Russian society. The most celebrated is Fathers and Sons (1862), in which generational and class conflict in the period of Alexander II's reforms is described through the interactions of the Kirsanov family (father, son, and uncle) with the young “nihilist” Bazarov.
The two other great realists of the 19th century were Dostoyevsky (Dostoyevsky, Fyodor) and Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy, Leo). Dostoyevsky, who was arrested in 1849 for his involvement in a socialist reading group, reentered the literary scene in the late 1850s. He experienced a religious conversion during his imprisonment, and his novels of the 1860s and '70s are suffused with messianic Orthodox ideas. His major novels—Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1868–69), The Possessed (1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80)—are filled with riveting, often unstable characters and dramatic scenes. While Dostoyevsky delves into the psychology of men and women at the edge, Tolstoy's novels treat the everyday existence of average people. In both War and Peace (1865–69) and Anna Karenina (1875–77), Tolstoy draws beautifully nuanced portraits filled with deep psychological and sociological insight.
By the early 1880s the hegemony of the realist novel was waning, though what would replace it was unclear. Russian poetry, notwithstanding the civic verse of Nikolay Nekrasov (Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich) and the subtle lyrics of Afanasy Fet (Fet, Afanasy Afanasyevich), had not played a central role in the literary process since the 1830s, and drama, despite the able work of Aleksandr Ostrovsky (Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Nikolayevich), was a marginal literary activity for most writers. The only major prose writer to appear in the 1880s and '90s was Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton), whose specialty was the short story. In his greatest stories—including The Man in a Case (1898), The Lady with a Lapdog (1899), The Darling (1899), and In the Ravine (1900)—Chekhov manages to attain all the power of his great predecessors in a remarkably compact form. Toward the end of his career, Chekhov also became known for his dramatic work, including such pillars of the world theatrical repertoire as Uncle Vanya (1897) and The Cherry Orchard (first performed 1904). Chekhov's heirs in the area of short fiction were Maksim Gorky (Gorky, Maksim) (later the dean of Soviet letters), who began his career by writing sympathetic portraits of various social outcasts, and the aristocrat Ivan Bunin (Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich), who emigrated after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933.
The 20th century
The beginning of the 20th century brought with it a new renaissance in Russian poetry and drama, a “Silver Age” that rivaled, and in some respects surpassed, the Pushkinian “Golden Age.” 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 (Symbolist movement). The first, “decadent” generation of Russian Symbolists included the poets Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich), Konstantin Balmont, and Zinaida Gippius (Gippius, Zinaida Nikolayevna). The second, more mystically and apocalyptically oriented generation included Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich) (perhaps the most talented lyric poet Russia ever produced), the poet and theoretician Vyacheslav Ivanov (Ivanov, Vyacheslav), and the poet and prose writer Andrey Bely (Bely, Andrey). The Symbolists dominated the literary scene until 1910, when internal dissension led to the movement's collapse.
The period just before and immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917 was marked by the work of six spectacularly talented, difficult poets. Anna Akhmatova (Akhmatova, Anna)'s brief, finely chiseled lyrics brought her fame at the outset of her career, but later in life she produced such longer works as Requiem, written from 1935 to 1940 but published in Russia only in 1989, her memorial to the victims of Joseph Stalin's purges (particularly her son, who was imprisoned in 1937). The Futurists (Futurism) Velimir Khlebnikov (Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich) engaged in innovative experiments to free poetic discourse from the fetters of tradition. Marina Tsvetayeva (Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna), another great poetic experimenter, produced much of her major work outside the country but returned to the Soviet Union in 1939, only to commit suicide there two years later. Boris Pasternak (Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958, produced lyrics of great depth and power in this period, and Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich) created some of the most beautiful and haunting lyric poems in the Russian language.