RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Literature of the Great Russian branch of the Eastern Slavs, written in Russian. Russian literature belongs within the mainstream of European letters, although it has original sources and powerful traditions that are distinctively its own. At times, it borrowed its forms and its themes from cultural centers extending beyond Russian borders, but these periods of dependency ended when Russian writers learned to fashion the borrowed material to their own special and original ends. At other times, for political and military reasons, Russia was shut off, or shut itself off, from the cultural movements of Europe. These periods of stagnation were followed by efforts to resume full contributing membership in the European literary world.

EARLY PERIOD

Throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance and early modern times, Russians developed their own literary traditions in isolation from Western Europe.

Kiev Period

(10th–13th cent.). The impetus to literary expression in Russia may be traced to the 9th-century Byzantine scholars and missionaries St. Cyril and St. Methodius, who wrote down and codified a Macedonian Slavic dialect later called Old Church Slavonic. The first great epoch of Russian civilization began in 988 when Saint Vladimir, or Vladimir I the Great, grand prince of Kiev, accepted Orthodox Christianity and opened Russia directly to the rich heritage of Byzantine culture. In the 250 years that followed, Kiev became a great city famed for its learned monasteries and for its Byzantine-style churches. Old Church Slavonic was introduced as a literary language. Byzantine works in Greek of religious and semireligious nature, such as Orthodox liturgies, sermons, lives of the saints, and collections of maxims, were translated into Old Church Slavonic. It continued for centuries to serve as the vehicle for literature.

Russian writers, usually monks or churchmen, mastered these imported forms and produced a native literature. The best works of the residue that has been preserved include the graceful and subtle sermon Slovo o zakone i blagodati (The Discourse on Law and Grace), composed about 1050 by the churchman Ilarion (d. 1053), and the celebrated Povest vremennykh let (The Primary Russian Chronicle), probably written by a monk, which purports to be the full historical record of the Eastern Slavic peoples from the time of their mythical origins to 1110, the date of the last entry. In addition to routine historical annals, important events such as Vladimir’s conversion to Christianity are told in a lively narrative style. One of the most extraordinary works of this period is Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Lay of Igor’s Host, c. 1185), a moving epic in which the anonymous author appealed for the unity of the Slavic peoples against invading Asian nomads.

Muscovite Period

(mid-13th–17th cent.). Kiev was sacked by Tatars from the east early in the 13th century, and by 1240 most of Russia had been occupied by the Golden Horde. Tatar domination lasted two centuries, a period in which Russian culture stagnated and decayed. Moscow became the new capital of Russia after the Tatars were expelled in the 15th century. When the Byzantine Empire fell (1453) to the Ottoman Turks, Russia, by a tragic irony of history, lost contact with the original source of all its cultural values at the very moment when it was able to reassert its political autonomy. Thus, during the first flush of the Renaissance the new Russian state found itself confronted by the Latin-based civilization of Western Christendom, deprived of cultural vitality by the long Tatar occupation, and cut off by the Turks from the Byzantine civilization that had first nourished Russian culture. A work that gives the most striking depiction of this period is the autobiography of the churchman Avvakum (1620?–82), The Life of the Archpriest Avvakum (1672–75; trans. 1924).

Western Influences

(18th cent.). When the cultural isolation of Russia came to an end during the reign of Czar Peter I, Russian writers faced the problem of adapting the themes, forms, and conventions of such Western influences as French classicism to the Russian scene. The syllabic verse form used by the French was at first blindly imitated by earnest Russians, who came slowly to understand that their language was completely unsuited to it. Two writers of the late 18th century who are still popular with Russian readers exemplify the growing independence of Russian literature from foreign models. The playwright Denis Fonvizin (1745–92) used many French classical devices in his popular comedies Brigadir (The Brigadier, 1786) and The Minor (1782; trans. 1960), but his characters are freshly conceived and unmistakable grotesques of Russian social types. The poet Gavriil Romanovich Derzhavin (1743–1816) was a gifted and original poet who combined classical forms with a highly personal and intensely lyrical use of the Russian language.

The period of intellectual activity known as the Enlightenment was represented in Russia by the scientist, poet, and authority on the Russian language Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov and by many of the scholars and writers who were active in the early years of the reign of Catherine the Great. After the French Revolution, however, Catherine largely abandoned her role as a patron of the intellectuals. The satirical journalist Nikolay Ivanovich Novikov (1744–1818) was silenced and arrested. The liberal Aleksandr Nikolayevich Radishchev (1749–1802), whose greatest work, Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790; trans. 1958), contained an eloquent plea for ending the injustices of serfdom, was exiled to Siberia in 1790 for ten years. Thus the pattern that was to govern the relations between the state and the intellectual during the 19th century was established.

THE 19TH CENTURY

The great age of Russian literature was the 19th century.

Pushkin and His Contemporaries.

Russian literary expression entered its richest phase with the work of the poet and prose writer Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin. He drew with easy authority on the many past sources of the literary language and created a new linguistic synthesis that endures to the present. A broadly cultivated man steeped in the order and harmony of French classicism, he participated subsequently in some of the major phases of romanticism and moved beyond it in his later years toward the realism that dominated middle and late 19th-century literature. He gave his age its most vivid image of the poet as a figure who is responsive, gallant, and dedicated to the special truth of art and to the needs of the people of his country.

Pushkin’s extensive lyrical output contains his disciplined personal response to a broad range of experiences, such as love, nature, and the problems of evil, time, fate, and death. In his historical tragedy Boris Godunov (1831; trans. 1953), he moved toward a Shakespearean level of expression. His greatest narrative work is the novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823–31; trans. 1964), considered his masterpiece. In this work, he dramatizes the fatal consequences that the jaded young hero’s ennui has on himself and on others. The narrative is enriched with lyrical interludes, descriptions of nature, social comment, and discussions on the nature of poetry. His concise verse line expresses irony, wit, intelligence, and deep emotion with extraordinary ease and virtuosity. When he turned to prose, his austere sense of order and harmony resulted in a lucid, expressive style that was to have a great influence on subsequent Russian prose.

Pushkin’s irreverent wit and impulsive love of freedom brought him into constant conflict with the regime of Czar Nicholas I, who not only subjected Pushkin to harassment and surveillance but also personally supervised his work. At his death, Pushkin was mourned by millions as the greatest Russian poet, an estimate that has not changed at the present time.

Pushkin’s most talented contemporaries, the brilliant fabulist Ivan Andreyevich Krylov (1768–1844) and the playwright Aleksandr Sergeyevich Griboedov (1795–1829), author of the famous social comedy Woe from Wit (1825; trans. 1951), wrote in verse. Pushkin was succeeded in importance for a few years by the poet and novelist Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov, a brilliant and tormented writer who became the most gifted and authentic voice of a certain type of romanticism. His dark, intense descriptions, in both lyric and narrative poems, of the disoriented type of sensibility associated with the life and work of the English poet Lord Byron, are unique for their power and depth. His best-known work is the novel A Hero of Our Times (1840; trans. 1886), a searching analysis of the life and values of his own kind of rebellious outcast. He turned to prose shortly before he died, anticipating the direction Russian literature took in the following years. The noted poets Afanasi Afanasyevich Fet (1820–92) and Fyodor Ivanovich Tyutchev (1803–73) are exceptions to the increasing preference in Russian literature for prose.

The novel, the novella, the short story, and the prose drama were the forms in which the writers of the great Russian literary age chose to work. Each writer made original use of these forms, developing his own style and his own themes. Certain general observations hold true nevertheless for the literary output of the period 1840 to 1880. The term realism, used generally to describe this body of work, indicates that the writers drew their subjects from the daily lives of people around them, that they aimed at a high degree of authenticity in their re-creations of experience, and that they conceived of their work as the means for exploring important questions about the human situation in the universe. They were all subject to the stresses of the endemic social crisis of Russia. These stresses took several forms, especially those of the constraining influence of conscience on sensitive people who could not fail to be aware of the moral disorder and social injustice in the world around them; the repressive force of government censorship; and the nagging pressure of radical literary critics, such as Vissarion Grigoryevich Belinsky (1811–48), Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, and Nikolay Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836–61), all of whom tried insistently to persuade writers to serve urgent programs of social change. Each of the major writers made his own adjustment to this situation. All generally agree, however, that their art was neither a remote, self-contained activity nor a social weapon to be entrusted to extraliterary authorities. The sovereign moral intelligence of the writer was the basis of the autonomy and integrity of the great 19th-century Russian literature.

Gogol.

The novelist and dramatist Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol, the first outstanding Russian prose writer, felt a messianic urgency to improve the moral condition of the people of his country. He expressed his solemn sense of mission in a type of comic hyperbole seldom equaled in world literature for its invention and lunatic energy. The wealth of grotesque detail with which he described his compatriots’ greed, sloth, corruption, and wretchedness received its highest expression in his great story “The Overcoat” (1842; trans. 1949) and in his dramatic masterpiece The Inspector General (1836; trans. 1968). His most famous work, the novel Dead Souls (1842; trans. 1877), is a riotous account of a swindler whose transactions with peasants, biologically dead but legally alive, take him through an immense landscape of moral disorder, pompous absurdity, and dim-witted greed.

Turgenev.

Russian fiction moved on to its apogee in the three decades that followed Gogol’s death in 1852. The novelist and short-story writer Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev, a cultivated man of letters, stood at the very center of his age. A friend of the leading artists and intellectuals of Russia and the West, he favored assimilation of Western European culture in Russia. Each of Turgenev’s major novels is built around a compact dramatic scheme involving the principal character’s search for happiness, love, or fulfillment in responsible work, or for all three. In all these novels, a flaw of character leads to the defeat of the protagonist’s aspirations. The defeat is deepened and generalized by a sense of the destructive passage of time. The hero of Turgenev’s best novel, Fathers and Sons (1862; trans. 1962), is a young radical whose doctrinal views prove inadequate to his emotional needs. Despite Turgenev’s intentions, the book was interpreted as an attack on radical reformers of the time.

Tolstoy.

The novelist, moral philosopher, and social reformer Count Leo Tolstoy was a man of wide interests, which were unified by his efforts to discover and propagate essential truths about the nature of human existence. In his realistic novel War and Peace (1865–69; trans. 1925), an epic of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, the problem of the meaning and nature of history and of man’s situation in it is central, but it is only one of several unifying ideas in the novel. Larger than the historical panorama looms the story of several Russian families whose complex destinies seem to touch on all the possibilities of human life. In Anna Karenina (1875–77; trans. 1958) Tolstoy fashioned a double narrative dramatizing contrary solutions to the problems of social customs and family life. One strand of this narrative is a tragic story of illicit love, one of the most powerful in world literature; the other strand presents the partly successful search of a man, resembling Tolstoy himself, for an attitude toward life that would contain marriage, family, work, nature, and God together in a harmonious whole. In later life, Tolstoy’s immense energies were directed largely toward his new role as social critic and prophet of a new order, but from time to time he returned to literature, as in his last full-length novel, Resurrection (1899–1900; trans. 1957).

Dostoyevsky.

Critics speak often of the “sunlit” normality and orderly rationality of Tolstoy’s fictional version of life. The novelist Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky must be discussed in exactly contrary terms; he dwelt in the irrational, explored the depths of experience, and found his dramas in extremes of human behavior, such as crime, rebellion, and blasphemy. In his great novel Crime and Punishment (1866; trans. 1955), for example, he described a murderer who kills out of a dense complex of motives and then, after terrible suffering, becomes reconciled with an imperfect world. In The Idiot (1868–69; trans. 1955) a Christlike character named Prince Myshkin enters into the riotous violence of Russian life and demonstrates his inadequacy as man and saint to cope in worldly terms with the destructive passions he encounters. The Devils (1871–72; trans. 1953; often translated also as The Possessed) is an assault on all sects and factions of the radical movement in Russia; in the central figure of Stavrogin, however, it goes beyond its topical origins to the outer limits of human knowledge of good and evil. In The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80; trans. 1958) three brothers, Ivan, an intellectual rebel against God’s law; Dmitri, a man possessed by earthly passion; and Alyosha, an exemplar of the Christian passion for selfless service, represent a composite portrait of the human family. In the course of the novel the brothers’ father is murdered; this action seems to dramatize the guilt of all humans as well as their hope for salvation.

Goncharov and Others.

Dostoyevsky died in 1881, Turgenev in 1882, and by that time Tolstoy had formally abandoned literature. Although these three writers dominated the great age, a number of less famous writers also contributed important works to Russian literature during this period. The novelist Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov, author of Oblomov (1859; trans. 1954), combined keen observations of social reality with pastoral and mythic elements in a haunting synthesis. N. Shchedrin (pseudonym of Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov, 1826–89) viewed Russian society with a mordant, satirical eye, as in History of a Town (1869–70). He transcended the topical in The Golovlyov Family (1876; trans. 1955), a remarkable novel of psychological horror and moral decay, which reversed the standards and values of the pastoral vision celebrated by Turgenev, Tolstoy, and others. In Chronicles of a Russian Family (1846–56; trans. 1924), Sergey Timofeyevich Aksakov sensitively described family life among the gentry, influencing many subsequent writers in their treatment of this subject. The novelist and short-story writer Nikolay Semyonovich Leskov explored other aspects of Russian society and the Russian mentality, such as the merchants, the folk, and the folk imagination, in the stories “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” (1866; trans. 1922) and “The Enchanted Wanderer” (1873; trans. 1924), and the provincial clergy in the novel Cathedral Folk (1872; trans. 1924). The foundation of a national dramatic repertory was established by Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky (1823–86) with such plays as Groza (The Storm, 1860) and other dramas of middle-class life.

Realists, Symbolists, and Other Late 19th-Century Writers.

The current of social realism that arose with Turgenev and Tolstoy continued to develop in the last two decades of the 19th century and on the outbreak of World War I and the two revolutions of 1917, but in somewhat altered and diminished form.

In the work of the dramatist and short-story writer Anton Pavlovich Chekhov prose realism became a highly refined medium for reproducing the colloquial tone and texture of ordinary existence. Distrustful of abstractions, doctrines, and the metaphysical and religious concerns of the earlier generation of writers, Chekhov concentrated on disclosing the particular circumstances of particular human lives in a finely disciplined prose style notable for its allusive turns of thought and precise formulation. Often the disclosure takes the form of a discovery by the central character that an unbridgeable gap exists between his aspirations and his actual situation or between his image of himself and the image of him developed by others. Banality, triviality, loneliness, and lovelessness recur constantly as the essential qualities of the lives under investigation in Chekhov’s works. Irony, pity, or disgust characterize Chekhov’s implicit comments on his characters. The dramatic tension in The Sea Gull (1896; trans. 1923), Uncle Vanya (1899; trans. 1923), Three Sisters (1901; trans. 1923), and The Cherry Orchard (1904; trans. 1923) is generated out of the inaction of his characters, their unformulated desires, or the unanswerable claims they make on life.

Other Russian writers of the late 19th century engaged in a complex movement that can best be defined as a total rebellion against the aesthetic assumptions and literary practice of the great age just passed. In this movement, poetry replaced prose; intuition replaced reason; transcendental assumptions about the nature and location of ultimate reality replaced the belief of the prose realists that experience could be known, reasoned, and ordered by the evidence of the senses through the medium of a clear, analytical prose. Society and social problems were replaced, as the arenas where important truths could be found, by the eternal problems of existence, by apprehensions, sometimes mystical, from the furthest reaches of consciousness. This movement drew on the mid-century revival of romantic ideas and attitudes in Western Europe, most notably on French symbolism, from which it took its own general designation, although the Russians made a highly original synthesis of the borrowed material, producing a great variety of ideas and talents.

Scholars have called the philosophical phase of this movement “idealist,” to emphasize its common repudiation of the materialist foundations of modern scientific philosophy. From this common viewpoint, a number of original minds formulated attitudes and systems based on mystical, theological, or personalist ideas. Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov attempted to achieve a systematic synthesis of the human, the natural, and the supernatural in his thought. Vasily Vasilyevich Rozanov (1856–1919), a critic of Christianity, sought to rejuvenate this movement by infusing it with a sense of biological, notably sexual, creativity. Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (1866–1949) endeavored in his philosophical writing to redefine certain orthodox theological ideas from a standpoint similar to that of Dostoyevsky and to rejuvenate Christian belief with a spirit of intense rapture. A number of other figures, including Lev Shestov (pseudonym of Lev Isaakovich Schwarzman, 1866–1938) and Nikolay Aleksandrovich Berdyayev, contributed original formulations of similar philosophical elements to the intellectual ferment of the prerevolutionary period. None of these men, however, figured prominently in the development of European philosophy, and they are not widely read or esteemed in the West. Their commitment to ill-defined mystical notions, moreover, opened the way for others to steep themselves in such eccentric or esoteric movements as occultism, theosophy, and anthroposophy.

THE 20TH CENTURY

By the turn of the century a considerable number of Russian writers were devoting their intellectual energies to poetry, among the greatest examples of which are the works of Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok, Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873–1924), Konstantin Dmitryevich Balmont (1867–1943), Andrei Bely (pseudonym of Boris Nikolayevich Bugayev. 1880–1934), and Zinaida Nikolayevna Gippius (1867–1945). Blok is the towering figure in this group. His imagination, released from the constraints of social morality and the scientific vision, constructed a poetic universe of a range and intensity of feeling rarely equaled in world poetry. His poetic vocabulary of the cosmic, the angelic, and the demonic is translated through the energetic and varied medium of his verse into the language of human passions, fears, and longings. He remained responsive to his times, and immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution produced one of his finest poems, The Twelve (1918; trans. 1920), a racy, powerful account of the adventures of a Red Army patrol, which is led, as indicated in the final lines, by Christ himself.

Symbolist writers wrote in prose, as well as in verse, but they insisted on altering the traditional properties of the novel. The poet, novelist, and critic Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky abandoned the Russian present entirely to write historical studies. Fyodor Sologub (pseudonym of Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov, 1863–1927) exposed the operation of supernatural forces beneath the surface of ordinary existence in the novel The Little Demon (1907; trans. 1916) and in his many short stories. Bely’s Petersburg (1912; trans. 1959), the outstanding prose work of the symbolist movement, experimented radically with the fictional dimensions of time and space and with the narrative point of view in ways that parallel technical developments in the modern novel in the West.

A number of writers worked completely independent of all schools. The short-story writer and dramatist Leonid Nikolayevich Andreyev and the short-story writer and novelist Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin (1870–1938) made distinctive contributions to Russian prose. The poet and novelist Ivan Alekseyevich Bunin, who was the first Russian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in literature (1933), worked primarily in short prose form, as did many of his contemporaries. His poetic stories about the final generation of the Russian gentry are marked by sharp psychological irony and a sentimental, haunting nostalgia for a lost way of life.

Gorki.

The novelist, dramatist, and essayist Maksim Gorki made a unique literary synthesis from his own youthful experience as a tramp in the Volga region, from the classical tradition as he learned it from Tolstoy and Chekhov, and from revolutionary political movements with which he was associated intermittently during most of his life. He is best known in the West for his early short stories, his three-volume autobiography, his play of the socially disinherited The Lower Depths (1902; trans. 1912), and his sensitive reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev. Soviet commentators emphasize his political contributions to literature, including the revolutionary novel Mother (1906; trans. 1929) and the anti-intelligentsia novel cycle The Life of Klim Samgin (1927–36; trans. 4 vol., 1930–38), and they celebrate him as a founder of the movement known as socialist realism.

Postrevolutionary Period

(1922–29). In the period of relative relaxation that followed the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, many writers and critics believed that their primary task was the creation of new forms appropriate to the new era. One school of thought that appeared during the 1920s under various labels, including Proletkult, On Guard, and On Literary Guard, claimed that a new proletarian culture would replace all the old forms and strove to gain control over all literature in order to hasten the process. Futurist writers, led by the poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky, proposed a drastic change in literary forms and images and in the texture of the language itself. A more conservative group, known as the Serapion Brothers, preferred to keep much closer to the classical Russian tradition, particularly in their insistence that literature was an autonomous activity.

Mayakovsky raised the pervasive spirit of experimentation and ferment to the pitch of brilliance. A master of hyperbolic declamation and of a new vulgar and shockingly vivid language, he was a most appropriate spokesman for the new energies that were released by the revolution. Roaring humor, mordant satire, and engagingly unservile declarations of loyalty to the Soviet regime characterize the best of his public poems and plays. The private voice of a vulnerable, sensitive person had been audible in many of his earlier poems, even amidst the bravado of the famous “The Cloud in Trousers” (1915). Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930; the suicide note and his final poem “At the Top of My Voice” suggest strongly that the tension between the claims of his public and private lives had damaged his poetic talent and had made existence unendurable for him.

Although the refined intellectualism of the prerevolutionary artistic world had no place in the new proletarian atmosphere, individual poets, heirs to the high literary culture of the recent past, continued to develop and write. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak developed one of the most distinctive poetic voices of modern times, exploring in his lyrical and narrative poems the act of perceiving, very much in the manner of the American poet Wallace Stevens. Anna Andreyevna Akhmatova and Osip Yemilyevich Mandelstam, both associated with the prerevolutionary Acmeist group, developed into major poets under the Soviet regime, although each encountered severe difficulties. Akhmatova remained silent between the early 1920s and the war years and was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1946. Mandelstam was arrested in the 1930s and died in a Siberian labor camp. Marina Tsvetayeva (b. 1892), a strikingly original poet, returned in 1939 from exile in Paris and committed suicide in 1941.

Early Soviet fiction was affected in part by the difficulties that writers encountered when they attempted to describe the revolution and the subsequent civil war. These events, marked by the chaotic disruption of public and private life, the collapse of institutions, and the implacable hostility between the warring halves of the nation, seemed to exceed the limits of order required by literary forms. Order was to be found only in military discipline and Communist ideology, not in the social relationships traditionally described by novelists. One of the popular novels of this period, Chapayev (1932; trans. 1935) by Dmitri Furmanov (1891–1926), presents a direct transcript of personal and historical events, ordered by political and military discipline, as the knowledgeable commissar tames the legendary guerrilla hero, Chapayev, and harnesses him to the sober purposes of the revolution. This combination of literal realism and political didacticism became the dominant mode of Soviet fiction, and Chapayev has been honored as one of the first authentic documents of socialist realism, which called for the presentation of human relationships primarily in their political aspect and which became the official literary doctrine of the Soviet Union after 1934. At the other end of the artistic spectrum are the precisely worked stories of Isaac Babel, collected in Red Cavalry (1926; trans. 1929). Each event, taken from the writer’s diary, is wrought into a perfect story. Each one tells, without moralizing, of the ironic discrepancies and the shocking couplings of people and events common to civil war, but with an emphasis on the larger human problems of violence, treachery, love, and death. A number of other novels fall between these artistic extremes and show varying degrees of originality and skill in solving the social and aesthetic problems of the time. Among them are Goroda i gody (Cities and Years, 1924) by Konstantin Aleksandrovich Fedin (1892–1977), The Badgers (1924; trans. 1947) by Leonid Maksimovich Leonov (1899–1994), and Razgrom (1927; The Nineteen or The Rout, 1929) by Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Fadeyev.

Relatively few novels were written about the immediate postwar period, that of the New Economic Policy, but the revival of private commerce during that era created an atmosphere particularly vulnerable to satire. The strange combination of revolutionary zeal and commercial roguery was exploited in such works as the novel The Embezzlers (1926; trans. 1929) by Valentin Petrovich Katayev (1897–1986); in the acid little stories and sketches of Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895–1958); and in the satirical Diamonds to Sit On (1928; trans. 1930) with its sequel The Little Golden Calf (1931; trans. 1932) by Ilya Arnoldovich Ilf (pseudonym of Ilya Arnoldovich Fainzilber, 1897–1937) and Yevgeny Petrovich Petrov (pseudonym of Yevgeny Petrovich Katayev, 1903–42). One serious novel, Leonov’s The Thief (1927; trans. 1931), traced the complex movements of a disillusioned Red soldier through the confused world of the 1920s and the maze of his own guilt to ultimate reconciliation with Russia and its revolution.

Socialist Realism

(1930–53). With the first five-year plan in 1929, the official tolerance of many kinds of writing and of competing literary journals and schools ended. A single administrative apparatus, the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), established political control of all literary activity, in conformity with the policies of the Communist party. Severe political judgments replaced ordinary literary discourse, and writers were placed under extreme pressure to conform. The usual result was black-and-white melodrama laid in the setting of a new factory construction site or in a village suspicious of collectivization but persuaded to accept it by iron-willed party organizers. The better writers tried to work within the formulas. Leonov wrote two novels in response to the social command, namely, Soviet River (1930; trans. 1932) and Skutarevsky (1932); Valentin Katayev produced a lighthearted variation on the construction theme in Time, Forward! (1932; trans. 1933); and Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, an exceptionally gifted novelist, wrote the most persuasive account of the agricultural crisis, Virgin Soil Upturned in 2 vol., Seeds of Tomorrow (1932–33; trans. 1959) and Harvest on the Don (1960; trans. 1960).

RAPP was dissolved in 1932 and replaced by the Union of Soviet Writers. The inaugural festival of the new era, the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers (1934), seemed to promise an atmosphere of liberality. In the keynote speech, however, the Politburo member Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948) defined the new literary doctrine, socialist realism, and indicated that a subtle and comprehensive system of adjustable controls had replaced the crude coercion of RAPP. Apparatus and doctrine, working in harmony, controlled the Russian literary imagination until the collapse of the Communist system.

Two novels rise above the general mediocrity of the years between 1934 and 1939. Leonov, again, remained within the given formula in Road to the Ocean (1935; trans. 1944), but he contrived a story of great narrative complexity and broad philosophical range in his account of the spiritual universe of a dying commissar. Sholokhov’s four-volume novel The Silent Don (4 vol., 1928–40; trans. in 2 vol., And Quiet Flows the Don, 1934, and The Don Flows Home to the Sea, 1941), generally regarded as the prose masterpiece of the Soviet epoch, violates some of the basic official literary attitudes. The confused wanderings of the novel’s cossack hero through the chaos of revolution and civil war in search of a viable moral truth end by compromising him with both political factions. Cut off forever from the certainties of his traditional life in nature, he comes to a classically tragic end.

During World War II, writers served the Soviet war effort as combat correspondents or pamphleteers. Their few fictional works emphasize such classical human themes of wartime as love, brotherhood, pain, and separation. Konstantin Simonov (1915–79) wrote a play, The Russian People (1942), a novel, Days and Nights (1944; trans. 1945), and a book of popular lyric poetry. Leonov produced a play, Invasion (1942; trans. 1944), and a short novel, The Taking of Velikoshumsk (1944; trans. Chariot of Wrath, 1946), which restate his concern for the soul of Soviet men amid total war and enemy occupation.

Shortly after the war, in his “Report on the Journals Zvesda and Leningrad” (1946), Zhdanov reversed the trend toward humanism and laid down the most restrictive definition of socialist realism formulated until then. Literature was to be judged, henceforth, solely by the criterion of partiinost, that is, by its service to the needs and program of the party. The result was the bleakest period that Russian literature had known for centuries.

From the Death of Stalin to the Dissolution of the USSR

(1953–91). After the death of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953, a widespread restlessness was indicated in critical debates and in several unconventional novels, including The Thaw (1954; trans. 1955) by Ilya Grigoryevich Ehrenburg and Not by Bread Alone (1956; trans. 1957) by Vladimir Dudintsev (1918–98). Both novels called into question important aspects of life in the Soviet Union, but neither approached the standards of the best Russian writing. Dudintsev’s novel was suppressed in a period of reaction, but subsequently a more liberal approach to literature was gradually adopted. A number of talented short-story writers, working in a more or less Chekhovian mode, eliminated or greatly reduced the political content of their works, turning their attention to the dramas of ordinary people in remote corners of their land. The outspoken poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko restored a certain moral passion to a moribund poetic tradition. His contemporary Andrey Voznesensky (1933– ) restored vitality to the poetic language and discovered resources of metaphor and rhythm to express response to the modern world in a refreshing and genuine voice. The frequent conflicts between these writers and the literary-political establishment suggest the prevailing limitations on form and content during this period. Until the glasnost (“openness”) of the late 1980s, the most vital Russian literary works were not published in the USSR but circulated in manuscript or published abroad.

The publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago in Italy (1957) and the U.S. (1958)—and, finally, in the USSR in 1987—demonstrated that the Russian classical tradition survived. This work, the story of the journey of a solitary individualist through the chaos of the civil war in search of authentic human experience, restates many traditional themes of the great 19th-century writers and questions the philosophical foundations of a Marxist society. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, but under the pressure of severe official attacks, he declined it.

Publication abroad was the only recourse of other gifted writers. In the early 1960s, the established critic and scholar Andrey Sinyavsky (1925–97) published a succession of brilliant works under the pseudonym of Abram Tertz, including a savagely ironic article “What Is Socialist Realism?,” which attacked the intellectual foundations of that doctrine; a series of fantastic stories; two angry political satires, “The Trial Begins” and “Lyubimov”; and a collection of gloomy philosophical meditations in which Sinyavsky professed his belief in the Christian God. In 1966, he and a colleague, Yuli Markovich Daniel (1925–88), were tried and sentenced to terms of hard labor for “slandering” the Soviet Union.

The celebrated novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the 1970 Nobel laureate in literature, found himself on both sides of the line between the permitted and the forbidden. In 1962, on the personal intervention of Premier Nikita S(ergeyevich) Khrushchev, his short novel on life in the concentration camp system, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (trans. 1963), was published. His two major novels, The First Circle (1968) and Cancer Ward (1968–69), however, were banned in the Soviet Union, but were published in the West in 1968. Solzhenitsyn’s fiction recapitulates his own life as an army veteran, a longtime inmate of concentration camps, and a victim of cancer. His fictional version of his experience constituted a prophetic cry for a moral cleansing of his nation, a turning to an “ethical socialism,” and a world in which simple truth and decency prevail. His protests against censorship, against his own expulsion from the Writers’ Union, and against the practice of confining dissident intellectuals in insane asylums echoed the strenuous moral concerns of his fiction. He was forcibly deported to the West in 1974. After 20 years in exile, 17 spent in the U.S., Solzhenitsyn returned to live in Russia in May 1994.

The world of “illegal” literature in the post-Stalin period yielded the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. His major novel The Master and Margarita, satirizing the government, was written between 1929 and 1940; it was published posthumously in the USSR in 1967 and in two English translations soon after. The Soviet publication and the English translation based on it, however, were severely abridged. Also “illegal” was the striking work of the poet Joseph Brodsky and a number of other writers and thinkers. Brodsky, who was expelled from the Soviet Union, went to the U.S. in 1972; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1987 and was named U.S. poet laureate in 1991. Among his writings published in English are Selected Poems (1973) and Less Than One (1986), a collection of literary essays. Another dissident writer, Valeriy Tarsis (1906–83), was allowed to leave for Switzerland in 1966. His satirical attacks on the Soviet regime are embodied in such novels as The Bluebottle (1963; trans. 1963); Ward 7 (1965; trans. 1966), an autobiographical work based on his own experiences in a mental hospital; and The Pleasure Factory (1967), a bitingly witty story of people at a Black Sea resort. Such “illegal” works helped preserve the great traditions of Russian literature until the collapse of the Communist party and the dissolution of the Soviet state in 1991 ushered in a new era for Russian writers.

For additional information on individual writers, see biographies of those whose names are not followed by dates. R.W.M., RUFUS W. MATHEWSON, JR., M.A., Ph.D.