While the first post-Soviet literary movements can be mapped in terms of their relationship to the marketplace, the decades that followed the 1990s marked the return of politics to Russian literature. The two dominant aesthetic styles in Russia since 2000 have been Postmodernism and New Sincerity. In this chapter it is argued that these two styles have proven more similar than was immediately apparent, and that, ultimately, they have followed the same trajectory: practitioners who may have initially appeared progressive or cast themselves as apolitical largely moved politically to the right. Among radical movements, the chapter highlights recent Russophone political poetry from socialist feminist and radical queer communities.

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

Socialist Realism was the (only) art officially sponsored in the Soviet Union. This chapter traces how it emerged, developed and faded away along with the Soviet regime. Socialist Realism was specific and unique, as never before had an artistic movement became a focus of state and bureaucratic activity. The political servility, explicit propagandistic aims and aesthetic inferiority of this populist art gave Socialist Realism both originality and novelty. This chapter analyses the main functions of Socialist Realism, from the normalisation and de-realisation of Soviet reality and its transformation into socialism, to the legitimisation of the regime and the wider aims of historisation, mobilisation and interiorisation. It also explores the movement’s institutional dimensions and characteristic features, which included a propensity for superficial verisimilitude, a craving for melodrama, an evenness of style, and linguistic and structural conventionality.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proclaimed its goal as the creation of ‘new people’: the transformation of human bodies and minds to correspond to the transformation of society. Literature became a space in which this new model of human life could be explored. This chapter traces the genealogy of the ‘new person’ from the nineteenth century to the figure of the ideal worker in Socialist Realist texts of the 1930s and beyond. The temporal focus of the chapter lies in the decade following 1917, when urgent but often contradictory political imperatives shaped the new person in literary texts. The chapter focusses on three key tensions: the relationship between the individual and collective; competing ideals of spontaneous energy and iron discipline; and the ideal of the transformation of body and mind. It shows how texts explore the relationship between abstract ideals of humanness and their lived reality.

A substantial proportion of medieval texts consists of other texts. Form therefore needs to be understood on at least two levels, by distinguishing between what can be termed ‘composite’ forms and ‘constituent’ forms. Some composite forms are fairly fixed (the Bible is a composite form); others are quite fluid. Genre, in this textual dynamic, is an elusive and contested notion. As illustrative case studies, this chapter considers two types of narrative: chronicle and hagiography. Hagiography is defined by subject (writing about saints), not by form as such. But hagiographic narratives tend to be produced and reproduced in large-scale composite forms organised according to closed annual calendrical cycles, while chronicles are compilations (often compilations of compilations) organised according to open-ended annalistic sequence. Between them these large composite forms contain most of the individual narratives that tend to be extrapolated in modern editions and discussed in modern critical writings, as literary works.

The Introduction outlines key problems of conceptualising and shaping literary history in general, and Russian literary history in particular. It explains the radical decision to structure the volume not as an integrated narrative but as a set of chronologically parallel histories. The Introduction explains the choice of ‘movements’, ‘forms’, ‘mechanisms’, and ‘heroes’ as frameworks for the four main histories, yet also argues that further histories are imaginable, as indicated by the six clusters of smaller essays, or ‘boxes’. As for ‘Russian’: the adjective can refer to language, to geopolitical space, or to cultural and/or national identity. The relationships among these three categories are increasingly contested. Russian Studies have only recently begun to acknowledge and explore the distinctions that are well established for literatures in other imperial languages (for instance, English and Anglophone, French and Francophone). The polyphonic structure of the book facilitates constructive engagement with debates about reshaping the field.

The age of devotion is a descriptive designation for the period commonly labelled medieval, when the majority of literary texts were produced for devotional purposes. In the Russian context this extends roughly to the mid-seventeenth century. This chapter outlines and illustrates three approaches to the study of this literature: synchronic, diachronic, and dynamic. The synchronic approach emphasises features that are broadly characteristic of the age as a whole, such as the religious milieu (Orthodox Christianity), the language of high culture (Church Slavonic, in various interactions with East Slavonic), the medium of transmission (manuscript rather than print), and the problem of authorship (the prevalence of anonymity, the role of the scribe). The diachronic approach has produced various attempts to identify distinct periods in literary development. The dynamic approach emphasises the mutability of literary texts, such that it is necessary to view a work as a field of variously realised textual possibilities.

Vissarion Belinskii (1811–1848) is the most famous and influential literary critic in the history of Russian literature. Despite regular attempts to demonstrate the destructive effect of his ideas, Belinskii’s reputation has proved resilient. Yet the reasons why he remains such an influential figure can be hard to grasp.

Belinskii’s assessments do not always coincide with subsequent views on the literary canon, yet his intuitions could be impressive. For instance, he declared the primacy of Nikolai Gogol in the Russian canon long before Gogol had produced Inspector General (Revizor, 1836), Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842), or ‘The Overcoat’ (Shinel', 1842). Belinskii also admired the works of the young Mikhail Lermontov, who at the time had published very little. His review of Inspector General determined the main trend in the history of its interpretation, seeing it through a social lens.

The bureaucratic hierarchy established by Peter I’s Table of Ranks in 1722 irrevocably shaped the Petersburg text, above all through the poor insignificant copy clerks immortalised in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol and Fedor Dostoevskii all produced characters who became permanent literary icons as hapless cogs in the bureaucratic machine. The critic Vissarion Belinskii touted Gogol’s ‘realism’, promoting his use of ‘social types’ – characters recognisable from real life – to effect social change. Yet Gogol’s clerks were hardly realistic, let alone typical. Clearly the most salient prototypes for literary clerks are the literary clerks preceding them; these precursors (rather than any real-life models) became the ground on which new iterations of the hero emerged. The figure of the lowly civil servant persisted through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty-first, its copying itself becoming a medium for both cultural memory and artistic innovation.

This chapter examines forms of self-writing (memoir, autobiography, diaries, documentary prose, and other in-between genres) that demonstrate an ‘orientation toward authenticity’, to borrow the phrase of the writer-scholar Lidiia Ginzburg. The arc spans the late seventeenth century to the present, with a focus on the period from the end of World War II to the late Soviet era, which witnessed an explosion of non-fictional narratives to document the war, camps, and Stalinist terror. The chapter takes its cues from Ginzburg’s theory that in-between prose is uniquely innovative when it fixes its attention on concepts of the self and literary forms, and that it flourishes most when canonical genres are in flux. In addition to the topic of childhood and, more centrally, personal encounters with history, the chapter discusses the role of women writers, and the sub-genre of the memoirs of contemporaries written by members of the intelligentsia.

Tracing the figure of the ‘non-Russian’ across nearly three centuries of Russian writing and literary tendencies, this chapter considers how it came to embody cultural and philosophical values against which Russian writers sought to measure their own culture, history, and politics. The chapter shows that the ‘non-Russian’ was a figure central to a range of writers who grappled with Russia’s position between the symbolic antinomies of East and West, confronted the Russian and Soviet empires or emerged out of it, or used the figure to formulate what ‘Russianness’ could mean. As the constant companion of their ‘Russian’ counterparts, the ‘non-Russian’ figures examined in this chapter include those created by ethnically Russian writers as well as those who wrote in Russian while also navigating their own ethnic identities within various historical contexts and literary tendencies.

This chapter explores the unique formal features of the Russian novel from its tentative beginnings in the eighteenth century, through its rise in the 1840s, to its full flowering in the second half of the nineteenth century. The founders of the tradition broke with western models, setting a precedent for pushing generic boundaries. This involved experimentation with formal features (novel-in-verse, mixing history and essays with fictional narration, withholding narrative closure, etc.) and an expansion of the subject matter that novels were expected to contain. Given tight censorship, novels and literary criticism became a crucial space for engaging with the most pressing questions of the day. The form was made to accommodate ideological debates about social, political, scientific, and aesthetic issues far beyond the scope of most European novels. The Russian novel became rightfully famous for the depth of its psychological probing and the breadth of the existential questions it addresses.

Russian Postmodernism was a specific cultural trend that emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s before gaining prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s due to changing political and economic conditions in the USSR. This chapter assesses the applicability of existing theories of Postmodernism to Soviet culture. According to David Harvey and Fredric Jameson, Postmodernist art is a product of the conditions of late capitalism, yet this designation evidently cannot be applied to the Soviet Union. The chapter therefore outlines the specific historical, economic, and mental conditions that gave rise to Postmodernist cultural transformation in the Soviet context. At the same time, it offers an overview of the main authors and movements within Russian Postmodernism.

This chapter provides an overview of the longue durée of Russian literature’s engagement with non-heteronormative sexuality and non-normative genders as well as a more extended focus on the Modernist period as a time when queerness operated as a particularly generative cultural mechanism, stimulating new modes of literary production. While queer literary expression can be observed since the beginning of literature in Russia, the chapter argues that the early twentieth century saw the development of specific forms of literary poetics that were at once expressive of queerness and associated with it. The chapter also considers the history and philosophical connections of the most significant of these forms: the existential prosaic fragment.

Throughout the imperial period, but especially in the eighteenth century, the Russian imperial court held a quasi-monopoly on the production, circulation, and conservation of literary artefacts. As the dominant political and economic force in the Russian Empire, it was able to introduce a new type of public sphere by shaping the social mission of literary texts and dictating the norms according to which literature was to be created and judged. This chapter focuses on the reign of Catherine II in order to show how the court promoted social engineering through literature, in particular through the genres of panegyric poetry and neoclassical drama. Celebrated authors in turn benefited from the court’s support. As a result, the imperial palace combined political and aesthetic functions: it introduced a new ceremonial culture and deployed princely patronage to glorify the court’s policies and to impose an absolutist social and aesthetic order.

Much of Russian literature on the internet remains closely linked to traditional written and printed forms. Russian literature born online resembles that of much of the world, but some genres and forms follow different trajectories due to the peculiarities of the early local Russian online scene. In particular, poetry and code met early and often. Russian-language poets proved early adapters to the World Wide Web. Author-posted web poetry and prose has been anarchic and politically polarised. Early Russian online poetry projects like Vavilon.ru and LitKarta reflected hope for a liberal public sphere. By contrast, much web poetry and prose in the late 2010s and early 2020s has provided a place for celebrating right populism and policing borders – of Russianness, of gender and sexuality, of literary canon, language, and form.

This chapter provides a short history of folklore collection and an overview of the genres privileged by Russian folklorists. In the early 1800s, folklorists began writing down, editing, and publishing creative oral performance, primarily that of peasants, because it was thought that these performances reflected ancient traditions that had been passed down for centuries. In the course of transforming oral culture into print collections, genres were identified and codified. The epic (bylina) and the fairytale (skazka) were among the genres most prioritised. Their particular formal features served to anchor a diverse genre system that included historical songs, religious verses, legends, and mythological stories. The chapter identifies characteristic events and stock characters, as well as features of style, structure, and performance typical of these genres of narrative folklore. It concludes by commenting on the reciprocal relationship between folklore and literature.