Anton Chekhov (Chekhov, Anton)
When Tolstoy abandoned the prosaic ethos, Chekhov, one of the greatest short story writers in world literature, remained loyal to it. Indeed, he reinterpreted it within his essentially bourgeois values, stressing the moral necessity of ordinary virtues such as daily kindness, cleanliness, politeness, work, sobriety, paying one's debts, and avoiding self-pity. Replying to the intelligentsia's demand for political tendentiousness, which he equated with a stifling intellectual conformity, he maintained that his only “tendency” was a protest against lying in all its forms. In his hundreds of stories and novellas, which he wrote while practicing medicine, Chekhov adopts something of a clinical approach to ordinary life. Meticulous observation and broad sympathy for diverse points of view shape his fiction. In his stories, an overt plot subtly hints at other hidden stories, and so the experience of rereading his fiction often differs substantially from that produced by a first reading. Especially noteworthy are “Skuchnaya istoriya” (written 1889; “A Dreary Story”), “Duel” (written 1891; “The Duel”), “Palata No. 6” (written 1892; “Ward Number Six”), “Kryzhovnik” (written 1898; “Gooseberries”), “Dushechka” (written 1899; “The Darling”), “Dama s sobachkoy” (written 1899; “The Lady with the Lap Dog”), “Arkhiyerey” (written 1902; “The Bishop”), and “Nevesta” (written 1903; “The Betrothed”).
Along with Gogol's The Inspector General, Chekhov's plays are the high point of Russian drama. In his four great plays, Chayka (1896; The Seagull), Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya), Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), Chekhov's belief that life is lived at ordinary moments and that histrionics are a dangerous lie found expression in a major innovation, the undramatic drama—or, as it is sometimes called, the theatre of inaction.
The Silver Age
The period from the 1890s to 1917 was one of intellectual ferment, in which mysticism, aestheticism, Neo-Kantianism, eroticism, Marxism, apocalypticism, Nietzscheanism, and other movements combined with each other in improbable ways. Primarily an age of poetry, it also produced significant prose and drama. Russian Symbolism, which was influenced by French Symbolist (Symbolist movement) poetry and the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), is usually said to have begun with an essay by Dmitry Merezhkovsky (Merezhkovsky, Dmitry Sergeyevich), “O prichinakh upadka i o novykh techeniyakh sovremennoy russkoy literatury” (1893; “On the Reasons for the Decline and on the New Trends in Contemporary Russian Literature”). A poet and propagator of religious ideas, Merezhkovsky wrote a trilogy of novels, Khristos i Antikhrist (1896–1905; Christ and Antichrist), consisting of Yulian otstupnik(1896; Julian the Apostate), Leonardo da Vinchi (1901; Leonardo da Vinci), and Pyotr i Aleksey (1905; Peter and Alexis), which explores the relation of pagan and Christian views of the world.
Symbolists
The Symbolists saw art as a way to approach a higher reality. The first wave of Symbolists included Konstantin Balmont (1867–1942), who translated a number of English poets and wrote verse that he left unrevised on principle (he believed in first inspiration); Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich) (1873–1924), a poet and translator of French Symbolist verse and of Virgil's Aeneid, who for years was the leader of the movement; Zinaida Gippius (Gippius, Zinaida Nikolayevna) (1869–1945), who wrote decadent, erotic, and religious poetry; and Fyodor Sologub, author of melancholic verse and of a novel, Melky bes (1907; The Petty Demon), about a sadistic, homicidal, paranoid schoolteacher.
Three writers dominate the second wave of Symbolism. Eschatology and anthroposophy shaped the poetry and prose of Andrey Bely (Bely, Andrey), whose novel Peterburg (1913–22; St. Petersburg) is regarded as the masterpiece of Symbolist fiction. Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), who wrote the lyric drama Balaganchik (1906; “The Showbooth”), is best known for his poem Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve), which describes 12 brutal Red Guards who turn out to be unwittingly led by Jesus Christ. The principal theoretician of the Symbolist movement, Vyacheslav Ivanov (Ivanov, Vyacheslav Ivanovich) (1866–1949), wrote mythic poetry conveying a Neoplatonist philosophy.
Acmeists (Acmeist) and Futurists
In the second decade of the 20th century, Symbolism was challenged by two other schools, the Acmeists, who favoured clarity over metaphysical vagueness, and the brash Futurists (Futurism), who wanted to throw all earlier and most contemporary poetry “from the steamship of modernity.” Among the Acmeists, Nikolay Gumilyov (Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich) (1886–1921), who stressed poetic craftsmanship over the occult, was executed by the Bolsheviks. Already an accomplished creator of superb love lyrics in these years, Anna Akhmatova (Akhmatova, Anna) produced densely and brilliantly structured poems in the Soviet period, including Poema bez geroya (written 1940–62; A Poem Without a Hero) and Rekviyem(written 1935–40; Requiem), which was inspired by Soviet purges and was therefore unpublishable in Russia. From 1923 to 1940 she was forced into silence, and in 1946 Akhmatova and Zoshchenko became the target of official abuse by the Communist Party cultural spokesman Andrey Zhdanov (1896–1948). Some consider Osip Mandelshtam (Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich) (1891–1938), who died in a Soviet prison camp, to be the greatest Russian poet of the 20th century. Many of his difficult, allusive poems were preserved by his wife, Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899–1980), whose memoirs are themselves a classic.