Drama and prose fiction
Although the theatrical repertoire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries continued to be dominated by translations and adaptations, numerous, if not very distinguished, tragedies were written by Sumarokov, Kheraskov, Vladislav Ozerov, and others. Of greater merit were two comedies by Denis Fonvizin, Brigadir (1769; The Brigadier), a satire on Gallomania, and Nedorosl (1783; “The Minor”). Prose fiction began to appear in print only in the mid-18th century. Mikhail Chulkov's picaresque Prigozhaya povarikha (1770; “The Comely Cook”) is addressed to a popular audience. At the end of the 18th century, the dominant figure of Russian sentimentalism (sentimental novel) was Nikolay Karamzin (Karamzin, Nikolay Mikhaylovich), author of Pisma russkogo puteshestvennika (1792; Letters of a Russian Traveler, 1789–1790), describing a journey to western Europe in 1789–90, and of the very popular story “Bednaya Liza” (1792; “Poor Liza”), a tale of lovers separated because they belong to different social classes, which seems cloying to the modern reader. Appointed imperial historiographer, Karamzin later wrote the 12-volume Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo (1818–26; “History of the Russian State”), which is a landmark of Russian literature. Karamzin's importance also lies in his contribution to the Russian literary language. His writing reflected the language of high society, using a Gallicized vocabulary and syntax at the expense of Church Slavonic.
The 19th century
The Russian 19th century is one of the most fruitful periods in world literature. Several features, in addition to those mentioned above, distinguish the literary culture of these years: (1) Literature enjoyed greater prestige in Russia than in the West, and its achievements were sometimes thought (as Dostoyevsky once declared) to be the justification for the Russian people's very existence. Literary critics were typically the leaders of Russian intellectual life and political thought. (2) Literature and criticism were expected to fulfill functions, such as philosophical, moral, and religious analysis, that in Europe were typically assigned to distinct disciplines. Thus Dostoyevsky's works are central to the histories of all these areas of Russian thought. One can see why the highest achievement of Russian literature was probably the philosophical novel. (3) In the 19th (still more, the 20th) century, politics and literature were intimately connected, and a writer or critic was often called upon to be a political prophet.
The “Golden Age” of poetry
Readers relying on translations usually think of Russian literature almost exclusively in terms of prose, but for Russians their tradition is also, and perhaps equally, one of poetry. The 19th century began with the “Golden Age” of Russian poetry. An aristocratic sensibility, the culture of salons, an aura of friendly intimacy, and genres suitable to this ethos marked the poetry of this period. The romantic poet Vasily Zhukovsky (Zhukovsky, Vasily Andreyevich) is celebrated for several translations or adaptations that are major poems in their own right, including versions of the English poet Thomas Gray's An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard (1802 and 1839), Homer's Odyssey (completed 1847), and Lord Byron's “The Prisoner of Chillon” (1822). His “Svetlana” (1813) reworks the German poet Gottfried August Bürger's “Lenore.” Konstantin Batyushkov (Batyushkov, Konstantin Nikolayevich) was noted for playful and erotic as well as melancholy verse and for the elegy Umerayushchy Tass (1817; “The Dying Tasso”). The “Pushkin Pleiad,” consisting of poets of Pushkin's generation and closely associated with him, included Anton Delvig, Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky, and, most important, Yevgeny Baratynsky, who was a superb philosophical “poet of thought.”
Aleksandr Pushkin (Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeyevich)
Pushkin occupies a unique place in Russian literature. It is not just that Russians view him as their greatest poet; he is also virtually the symbol of Russian culture. His life, as well as his work, has acquired mythic status. To criticize Pushkin, or even one of his characters—as, for example, Tatyana, the heroine of his novel Yevgeny Onegin (written 1823–31; Eugene Onegin)—has been taken as something akin to blasphemy. Pushkin's quasi-sacred status has itself been parodied by Russian authors, including the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko, the absurdist Daniil Kharms, and, most recently, Andrey Sinyavsky in his Progulki s Pushkinym (1972; Strolls with Pushkin).
Even if one sets this mythic image aside, Pushkin is truly one of the world's most accomplished poets; his verse, however, which relies on the author's perfect control of form, tone, and language, does not read well in translation. Deeply playful and experimental, Pushkin adopted a vast array of conflicting masks and personae. He writes now seriously, now with irony, and now with irony at his own irony, on moral and philosophical themes. He is ultimately a philosophical fox, appreciating the limitations, as well as the virtues, of any set of ideas. A master parodist (parody), Pushkin wrote a number of erotic and at times sacrilegious mock-epics, such as “Gavriiliada” (1821; “The Gabrieliad”), a scabrous retelling of the Annunciation, and Ruslan i Lyudmila (1820; Ruslan and Ludmila), which, after parodying epic, folk tale, literary ballad, and romance in a spirit of pure play, ends with a startlingly sombre epilogue. His diverse lyrics include a series on the poet's double identity as artist and man of the world; political poems that got him into trouble with the tsar as well as poems in praise of the tsar and his suppression of the Poles; some remarkable elegies (“Vospominaniye” [1828; “Remembrance”]; “Elegiya” [1830; “Elegy”]); love poems, including the “imageless” “Ya vas lyubil” (1829; “I Loved You Once”); and powerful meditations on human evil (“Anchar” [1828; “The Upas Tree”]; “Ne day mne Bog soyti s uma” [1833; “God Grant I Go Not Mad”]).
Pushkin's narrative poems include Tsygany (1824; “The Gypsies”), which considers the meaning of freedom. Plot is mere excuse for parody of literary forms and conventions inDomik v Kolomne (1830; The Little House in Kolomna). Most famously, Medny vsadnik (written 1833; The Bronze Horseman), which reflects on Peter the Great and the significance of St. Petersburg, examines the meaning of history in relation to individual lives. Concern with the nature of historical causation also led to complex formal innovations in the quasi-Shakespearean drama Boris Godunov (written 1824–25), which reworked Karamzin's Istoriya gosudarstva rossiyskogo and was in turn reworked by other artists, notably Modest Mussorgsky in his opera Boris Godunov (1869; revised 1874). Pushkin's greatest work was probably Eugene Onegin, the first truly great Russian novel and the source of countless themes and images in Russian fiction. Playful in the manner of Sterne's Tristram Shandy and Lord Byron's Don Juan, it far surpasses them for sheer brilliance of form, wit, and thought. Amid endless clever digressions, in which the poet adopts a dazzling array of tones and engages in myriad self-conscious self-parodies, it tells the story of Onegin, a “ superfluous man”—that is, a man with no core or purpose to his life—and Tatyana, who stands for authenticity in a sea of literary or social clichés, which she somehow manages to transcend even when she accepts them. The work's serial publication over several years enabled both its own unpredictable creation and changes in the author's perspective to become themes of the poem itself.