Many of the writers who began to publish immediately after the 1917 revolution turned to prose, particularly the short story and the novella. Those who had been inspired by the recent revolution and the subsequent Russian Civil War (1918–20) included Boris Pilnyak (Pilnyak, Boris) (The Naked Year [1922]), Isaak Babel (Babel, Isaak Emmanuilovich) (Red Cavalry [1926]), and Mikhail Sholokhov (Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich), who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965. Others described life in the new Soviet Union with varying degrees of mordant sarcasm; the short stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko (Zoshchenko, Mikhail Mikhaylovich), the comic novels of Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov (Ilf and Petrov), and the short novel Envy (1927) by Yury Olesha (Olesha, Yury Karlovich) fall into this category. Writing in Russian also flourished in communities of anticommunist exiles in Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, as represented by writers as various as the novelists Vladimir Nabokov (Nabokov, Vladimir) and Yevgeny Zamyatin (Zamyatin, Yevgeny Ivanovich) and the theologian-philosophers Vladimir Nikolayevich Lossky, Sergey Bulgakov, and Nikolay Berdyayev.
In the first decade after the revolution, there were also advances in literary theory and criticism, which changed methods of literary study throughout the world. Members of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and of OPOYAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniya Poeticheskogo Yazyka; Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) combined to create Formalist (Formalism) literary criticism (see Formalism), a movement that concentrated on analyzing the internal structure of literary texts. At the same time, Mikhail Bakhtin (Bakhtin, Mikhail) began to develop a sophisticated criticism concerned with ethical problems and ways of representing them, especially in the novel, his favourite genre.
By the late 1920s the period of Soviet experimentation had ended. censorship became much stricter, and many of the best writers were silenced. During the late 1920s and the '30s, there appeared what became known as the classics of Socialist Realism, a literary method that in 1934 was declared to be the only acceptable one for Soviet writers. Only a few of these works produced in this style—notably Fyodor Gladkov (Gladkov, Fyodor Vasilyevich)'s Cement (1925), Nikolay Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–34), and Valentin Katayev (Katayev, Valentin)'s Time, Forward! (1932)—have retained some literary interest. The real masterpieces of this period, however, did not fit the canons of Socialist Realism and were not published until many years later. They include Mikhail Bulgakov (Bulgakov, Mikhail Afanasyevich)'s grotesquely funny The Master and Margarita (1966–67) and Andrey Platonov (Platonov, Sergey Fyodorovich)'s dark pictures of rural and semiurban Russia, The Foundation Pit (1973) and Chevengur (1972).
With Stalin's death in 1953 and the subsequent “thaw,” new writers and trends appeared in the 1950s and early '60s. Vibrant young poets such as Joseph Brodsky (Brodsky, Joseph), Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Yevtushenko, Yevgeny), and Andrey Voznesensky (Voznesensky, Andrey Andreyevich) exerted a significant influence, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich) emerged from a Soviet prison camp ( Gulag) and shocked the country and the world with details of his brutal experiences in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). “Youth” prose on the model of American writer J.D. Salinger (Salinger, J D) appeared as well, particularly in the work of Vasily Aksyonov (Aksyonov, Vasily Pavlovich) and Vladimir Voynovich (Voynovich, Vladimir). By the late 1960s, however, most of these writers had again been silenced. Solzhenitsyn—who was charged with treason shortly after the publication of the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in 1973—and Brodsky, Aksyonov, and Voynovich had all been forced into exile by 1980, and the best writing was again unpublishable. Practically the only decent writing published from the late 1960s through the early 1980s came from the “village prose” writers, who treated the clash of rural traditions with modern life in a realistic idiom; the most notable members of this group are the novelist Valentin Rasputin and the short-story writer Vasily Shukshin. The morally complex fiction of Yury Trifonov, staged in the urban setting (e.g., The House on the Embankment [1976]), stands somewhat apart from the works of Rasputin and Shukshin that praise Russian rural simplicity. Nevertheless, as with the 1930s and '40s, the most important literature of this period was first published outside the Soviet Union. Notable writers include Varlam Shalamov (Shalamov, Varlam), whose exquisitely artistic stories chronicled the horrors of the prison camps; Andrey Sinyavsky (Sinyavsky, Andrey Donatovich), whose complex novelGoodnight! appeared in Europe in 1984, long after he had been forced to leave the Soviet Union; and Venedikt Yerofeyev, whose grotesque latter-day picaresque Moscow-Petushki—published in a clandestine ( samizdat) edition in 1968—is a minor classic.
Some of the best work published in the 1980s was in poetry, including the work of conceptualists such as Dmitry Prigov and the meta-metaphoric poetry of Aleksey Parshchikov, Olga Sedakova, Ilya Kutik, and others. The turbulent 1990s were a difficult period for most Russian writers and poets. The publishing industry, adversely affected by the economic downturn, struggled to regain its footing in the conditions of a market economy. Nonetheless, private foundations began awarding annual literary prizes, such as the Russian Booker Prize and the Little Booker Prize. The so-called Anti-Booker Prize—its name, a protest against the British origins of the Booker Prize, was selected to emphasize that it was a Russian award for Russian writers—was first presented in 1995 by the Nezavisimaya Gazeta. Tatyana Tolstaya began to occupy a prominent role following the publication of her novel The Slynx (2000), a satire about a disastrous hypothetical future for Moscow. Some critics considered the decade the “twilight period in Russian literature,” because of the departure from traditional psychological novels about contemporary life in favour of detective novels. Indeed, such novels were among the best-selling fiction of the period, particularly the work of Boris Akunin, whose Koronatsiia (“Coronation”) won the Anti-Booker Prize in 2000. (For further discussion, see Russian literature.)