Each of Pushkin's four “little tragedies,” all written in 1830, succinctly deals with a philosophical problem. The most remarkable, Motsart i Salyeri (Mozart and Salieri), based on a legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart, meditates on the nature of creativity while introducing, in brilliantly compressed speeches, what was to be one of the important Russian themes—metaphysical rebellion against God.
After 1830 Pushkin turned to prose. He wrote both a novella and a nonfictional account—Kapitanskaya dochka (1836; The Captain's Daughter) and Istoriya Pugachovskogo bunta(1834; The History of Pugachev)—about the same historical events, as if to illustrate that representing the historical truth requires more than one genre. Povesti pokoynogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina (1830; Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin) filters five narratives, each a parody of a received plot, through the minds of several narrators, collectors, or editors.Pikovaya dama (1834; The Queen of Spades) offers a suspenseful account of a man seeking mystic knowledge that would enable him to gamble without risk and, implicitly, to know the deepest forbidden truths. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment may be seen as an expansion of Pushkin's brief story.
Lermontov (Lermontov, Mikhail) and Griboyedov
Next to Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, who personifies Romanticism, is probably Russia's most frequently anthologized poet. His celebrated lyrics often recycle lines from his own and others' poems. “Smert poeta” (1837; “Death of a Poet”), which first earned him fame, deals with Pushkin's death shortly after a fatal duel in 1837. Among his narrative poems, Demon(1841; The Demon) describes the love of a Byronic demon for a mortal woman; Pesnya pro tsarya Ivana Vasilyevicha, molodogo oprichnika i udalogo kuptsa Kalashnikova (1837; A Song About Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich, His Young Bodyguard, and the Valiant Merchant Kalashnikov) is a stylized folk epic. Also an accomplished prose stylist, Lermontov wrote Geroy nashego vremeni (1840; A Hero of Our Time), which in form is something between a novel and a complexly framed cycle of stories about a single hero, a Byronic superfluous man. This work ranges from sketches of philosophical brilliance (“The Fatalist”) to episodes of near puerility (“Princess Mary”). The theme of the superfluous man finds another important rendition in Aleksandr Griboyedov's classic work, Gore ot uma (completed 1824; Woe from Wit).
Nikolay Gogol (Gogol, Nikolay)
One of the finest comic authors of world literature, and perhaps its most accomplished nonsense writer, Gogol is best known for his short stories, for his play Revizor (1836; The Inspector General, or The Government Inspector), and for Myortvye dushi (1842; Dead Souls), a prose narrative that is nevertheless subtitled a “poem.” “Nos” (1836; “The Nose”), a parable on the failure of all explanatory systems, relates an utterly inexplicable incident and the attempts to come to terms with it. Both “Shinel” (1842; “The Overcoat”), which is probably the most influential Russian short story, and “Zapiski sumasshedshego” (1835; “The Diary of a Madman”) mix pathos and mockery in an amazing display. As in “Nevsky prospekt” (1835; “Nevsky Avenue”) and “Povest o tom, kak possorilsya Ivan Ivanovich s Ivanom Nikiforovichem” (1835; “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich”), language itself seems to generate its own absurd content while the universe turns out to be a counterfeit of which there is no original. Characteristic of Gogol is a sense of boundless superfluity that is soon revealed as utter emptiness and a rich comedy that suddenly turns into metaphysical horror. The Inspector General develops a sequence of (witting and unwitting) confidence games within confidence games in a corrupt world of endless self-deception. The mock-epic, even mock-satiric, Dead Souls simultaneously allegorizes the timeless bureaucratic tendency to make official documentation more genuine than actual existence, the emptiness of the human soul, and the mind's absurd ways of grasping meaning or value. It is one of the most striking (and most Gogolian) ironies of Russian literary history that radical critics celebrated Gogol as a realist.
Other poets and dramatists
From the death of Lermontov until the end of the 19th century, Russian literature was dominated by prose, but some poets of lasting interest appeared. Fyodor Tyutchev (Tyutchev, Fyodor Ivanovich), a member of Pushkin's generation, wrote nature, love, and political poetry but is probably best appreciated for his philosophical “poetry of thought,” including “Silentium!” (1830). Afanasy Fet (Fet, Afanasy Afanasyevich) wrote delicate love lyrics remarkable for their absence of verbs. Violently attacked by radical critics as symbolizing pure art, he came to be appreciated by the Symbolist poets to follow. Nikolay Nekrasov (Nekrasov, Nikolay Alekseyevich), who was also a major figure in Russian journalism, wrote social satires, tendentious “civic” verse, and compassionate accounts of peasant life, including Komu na Rusi zhit khorosho? (1879; Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia?), which he began writing in 1863 and left unfinished at the time of his death.
Among the dramatists of this period, Aleksandr Ostrovsky (Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Nikolayevich), who has proved much more popular in Russia than abroad, wrote many slice-of-life plays about the Russian merchantry. His plays Svoi lyudi—sochtyomsya! (1850; “It's a Family Affair—We'll Settle It Among Ourselves”; Eng. trans. A Family Affair) and Groza (1859;The Thunderstorm) were the subject of reviews by Nikolay Dobrolyubov (1836–61), one of Russia's most influential radical critics. Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin wrote a macabre trilogy, whose third play, Smert Tarelkina (1869; The Death of Tarelkin), is a brilliant piece of grotesque humour about a man who fakes his own death. The theme of the faked suicide, a motif of Russian drama, later appeared in Leo Tolstoy's Zhivoy trup (written 1900; The Living Corpse) and Nikolay Erdman's Samoubiytsa (1928; The Suicide).