The two most important Futurist poets were Velimir Khlebnikov (Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich). Khlebnikov hoped to find the laws of history through numerology and developed amazingly implausible theories about language and its origins. His verse, which is characterized by neologisms and “trans-sense” language, includes “Zaklyatiye smekhom” (1910; “Incantation by Laughter”) and Zangezi (1922). Mayakovsky epitomized the spirit of romantic bohemian radicalism. Humour, bravado, and self-pity characterize his inventive long poems, including Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers). After the Russian Revolution in 1917, which he ardently supported initially, Mayakovsky “stepped on the throat” of his song to produce propaganda poems. But he also satirized Soviet bureaucracy in the witty “Razgovor s fininspektorom o poezii” (1926; “Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry”). As a dramatist, he is best known for Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913), in which he played the lead role, and Klop (1929;The Bedbug), in which a philistine, along with a bedbug, is resurrected into the banal communist future of 1979. Having written a poem about the suicide of the peasant poet Sergey Yesenin (1895–1925), Mayakovsky later shot himself, leaving a brilliantly ironic suicide note with a poem explaining that “love's boat has smashed against daily life.”
Others
Celebrated in their day, the fiction writers Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919), Aleksandr Kuprin (1870–1938), and Vladimir Korolenko (1853–1921) now have faded reputations. But Ivan Bunin (Bunin, Ivan Alekseyevich), who became the first Russian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1933), wrote superb works both before the Revolution and as an émigré after it. Especially noteworthy are his dark novella Derevnya (1910; The Village), which is relentlessly critical of Russians, and his Zhizn Arsenyeva (1930; The Life of Arseniev, or The Well of Days), a fictionalized autobiography. Maksim Gorky (Gorky, Maksim) became the official founder of Socialist Realism. Western readers now appreciate his three-volume autobiographyDetstvo (1913–14; My Childhood), V lyudyakh (1915–16; In the World, or My Apprenticeship), and Moi universitety (1923; My Universities) and his Vospominaniya o Lve Nikolayeviche Tolstom (1919; Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy). His highly tendentious novel Mat (1906; Mother), a model for Socialist Realism, and many other works divide characters simplistically into two groups—progressive and virtuous or reactionary and vicious.
Post-Revolutionary literature
Literature under Soviet rule
The Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917) radically changed Russian literature. After a brief period of relative openness (compared to what followed) in the 1920s, literature became a tool of state propaganda. Officially approved writing (the only kind that could be published) by and large sank to a subliterary level. Censorship, imprisonment in labour camps, and mass terror were only part of the problem. Writers were not only forbidden to create works that were dissident, formally complex, or objective (a term of reproach), but they were also expected to fulfill the dictates of the Communist Party to produce propaganda on specific, often rather narrow, themes of current interest to it. Writers were called upon to be “engineers of human souls” helping to produce “the new Soviet man.”
As a result of Bolshevik rule, the literary tradition was fragmented. In addition to official Soviet Russian literature, two kinds of unofficial literature existed. First, a tradition of émigré literature, containing some of the best works of the century, continued until the fall of the Soviet Union. Second, unofficial literature written within the Soviet Union came to include works circulated illegally in typewritten copies (“ samizdat”), works smuggled abroad for publication (“tamizdat”), and works written “for the drawer,” or not published until decades after they were written (“delayed” literature). Moreover, literature publishable at one time often lost favour later; although nominally acceptable, it was frequently unobtainable. On many occasions, even officially celebrated works had to be rewritten to suit a shift in the Communist Party line. Whereas pre-Revolutionary writers had been intensely aware of Western trends, for much of the Soviet period access to Western movements was severely restricted, as was foreign travel. Access to pre-Revolutionary Russian writing was also spotty. As a result, Russians periodically had to change their sense of the past, as did Western scholars when “delayed” works became known.
From a literary point of view, unofficial literature clearly surpasses official literature. Of Russia's five winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature during the Soviet period, Bunin emigrated after the Revolution, Boris Pasternak had his novel Doctor Zhivago (1957) published abroad, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918) had most of his works published abroad and was expelled from the Soviet Union, and Joseph Brodsky (1940–96) published all his collections of verse abroad and was forced to emigrate in 1972. Only Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–84) was clearly an official Soviet writer. In the early years following the Revolution, writers who left or were expelled from the Soviet Union included Balmont, Bunin, Gippius, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Kuprin, and Merezhkovsky. Émigrés also included the poets Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939) and Georgy Ivanov (1894–1958). Marina Tsvetayeva (Tsvetayeva, Marina Ivanovna) (1892–1941), regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, eventually returned to Russia, where she committed suicide. Vladimir Nabokov (Nabokov, Vladimir), who later wrote in English, published nine novels in Russian, including Dar (published serially 1937–38; The Gift) and Priglasheniye na kazn (1938; Invitation to a Beheading).
From the 1920s to c. 1985