Russian Language and Literature

Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union. Prior to the nineteenth century, the seeds of the Russian literary tradition were sown by the poets, playwrights and writers as Gavrila Derzhavin, Denis Fonvizin, Alexander Sumarokov, Vasily Trediakovsky, Nikolay Karamzin and Ivan Krylov.

From the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age, beginning with the poet Alexander Pushkin and culminating in two of the greatest novelists in world literature, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A second wave followed, led by prosaists Anton Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. In the Twentieth Century leading figures of Russian literature included internationally recognised poets such as Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Anna Achmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky and prose writers Ivan Bunin, Andrei Bely, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Andrey Platonov, Vassily Grossman and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

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