Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) was a poet firmly embedded in tradition, not a radical innovator but always aware of his predecessors and alert to ways of adapting and improving the models they provided. The exception that proves the rule is the Onegin stanza, the only instance in all of Pushkin’s oeuvre where he created his own stanzaic form. He did so for his unprecedented ‘novel in verse’ Eugene Onegin (Evgenii Onegin), widely considered the cornerstone of the Russian literary tradition. Composed from 1823 to 1831 and published serially between 1825 and 1832, the work is marked by sudden shifts in theme, character, setting, and mood.

Translated Byzantine lives of saints occupied considerable space in the hagiographic corpus of Rus and medieval Russia. But original (non-translated) vitae differ significantly from their Greek models in several respects: the very causes of their subjects’ sanctity (the Rus corpus emphasises saintly princes and founders of monasteries); their extremes of self-mortification (as in the case of Varlaam of Keret); and the extravagance of their feats (such as those of Andrew of Crete, or Petr and Fevroniia). Compared to Byzantine hagiography, the Lives of holy fools are overrepresented in the repertoire of medieval Rus, while female saints are underrepresented in it. In the modern era, Russian literature has drawn heavily on the medieval vitae. This tradition became pronounced in the mid-nineteenth century, but communist writers of the twentieth century also fashioned their heroes in the hagiographic mould.

This chapter describes the development of Russian drama over the first two centuries of its history. It begins with the court theatre of the seventeenth century, which formed under the influence of Polish and Ukrainian examples, and goes on to trace the slow development of public theatre. The chapter presents the political and social transformation of the audience as both a driving force behind the evolution of Russian drama and an important theme of numerous authors, including but not limited to Aleksandr Sumarokov, Denis Fonvizin, Aleksandr Griboedov, Nikolai Gogol, and Aleksandr Ostrovskii. The work of these authors reflected the shifting values and conditions of Russian society and state ideology, and influenced spectators and readers by offering up models of behaviour.

This chapter outlines the history of Russian Realism against a European backdrop. In the Russian Empire, as in Europe, there were no influential aesthetic manifestos predating the rise of Realist literature. Although the first seeds of the movement can be seen in the work of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii, this chapter considers the dominant period of Russian Realism to be the period from 1845 to the 1880s. The Natural School foregrounded the genre of the physiological sketch and produced the first Realist novels by Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Herzen, and Ivan Goncharov. The ‘High’ Realism of the 1850s−80s featured a proliferation of the novel as a genre and thematic preoccupations with the role of gentry, the peasant question, political radicalism, the ‘woman question’, and bureaucracy.

This chapter describes the process whereby modern Russian literature came into being and entered the western European cultural mainstream in the eighteenth century. The period witnessed the creation of a modern vernacular Russian literary language and saw the development of the basic features of a modern literature with its literary and institutional infrastructure. The term ‘Classicism’ came into use in the 1820s as a retroactive label that disparaged the previous century’s literature as hopelessly rule-bound and obsolete, but this hardly corresponds to its complex, dynamic, and in fact intensely creative character. The chapter surveys the period through the lens of the modern literary language, with a focus on the creation of the so-called ‘Slaveno-Russian cultural and linguistic synthesis’ of mid-century that resolved the problem of the Baroque heritage and fundamentally shaped the literary practice of the age.

This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.

The evolution of Russian drama from the early twentieth century to the present day has been shaped by an alternation between censorship and relaxation, and has included exciting periods of formal innovation. The psychological realism of Konstantin Stanislavskii’s stagings of Anton Chekhov’s plays was challenged by the post−1917 radicalism of Vsevolod Meierkhold, exemplified in his production of Vladimir Maiakovskii’s Mystery-Bouffe. Experimentation gave way to rigidity under Socialist Realism, but the post-Stalin era saw cautious innovation in playwriting succeeded by a flourishing culture of ‘director’s theatre’, led by figures such as Iurii Liubimov. Innovations gathered pace under glasnost, opening out to the bold variety of ‘New Drama’ in the twenty-first century. This has now given way to the rigid constraints imposed by the Putin regime.

This chapter traces the rise of secular, non-governmental publishing in Russia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that a succession of risk-taking entrepreneurs eventually made it possible for authors to become remunerated professionals and to become the entertainers, tribunes, and conscience of the nation. Despite the obstacles of government interference, undercapitalisation, and mass illiteracy, publishers underwent a series of transformations, from printer-artisans to merchant-booksellers to, by the 1840s, intellectuals, becoming a force for shaping imaginative literature, primarily through the medium of the thick journal. Only by the end of this period did they become major print capitalists, but even then, the publisher often remained a creaky mechanism for producing literature, with poorly fitting parts and thin financial lubrication. The influence of these publishers and their enterprises, however, is demonstrated by the fact that the new Soviet regime made closing them down one of its first tasks.

This chapter outlines the role of empire in shaping Russian literature from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It traces the persistent literary impact of empire using the concept of imperiality, developed by analogy with coloniality, which decolonial theory describes as a sociopolitical and cognitive framework that endures beyond the times of colonialism. The chapter highlights the impact of empire on eighteenth-century Neoclassical poetry and on literature of the Romantic era. It then explores the enduring presence of empire in later periods, including Realist and early Modernist writing, as Russia’s colonial practices combined with a self-image as a magnificent and much-put-upon nation state. Finally, it presents the Soviet-era cultural system of the ‘friendship of the peoples’ as a reimagined imperiality and concludes with an in-depth discussion of critical reflections on imperial legacies by post-Soviet authors such as Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia.

This chapter traces the evolution of a specific character type that began with Aleksandr Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina in Eugene Onegin. In the hands of future authors such as Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoevskii, Tatiana came to represent an ideal for the Russian woman based on soulfulness, fidelity, and self-sacrifice. Russian women writers, too, used Tatiana as a model for their heroines. With the rise of the ‘woman question’ in the 1860s, the Russian woman was redefined to reveal her new potentials in a shifting society, with Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s Vera Pavlovna as a new ideal. In the Soviet period, she was rethought yet again to respond to shifting political mandates, variously downplaying or emphasising her maternal, caregiving side. The faithful, all-enduring Tatiana took on a new form in Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and continues to evolve in contemporary feminist writing.

The chronology of the Baroque age in Russian culture is contested, but by the broadest definition it can be located in the second half of the seventeenth century and approximately the first third of the eighteenth century. The emergence of the Baroque tends to coincide with the emergence of the court as a focus and patron. General features include a greater prominence of individuality (even originality), a greater emphasis on entertainment as one function and purpose of literary production, and a highlighting of performative verbal and formal devices. This chapter explores two types of literary production that particularly exemplify aspects of the Baroque mode: parody and satire, and syllabic verse. As a case-study in the latter, the chapter introduces a cycle of poems by the most prominent and prolific Baroque versifier, and arguably Moscow’s first professional writer of literature, Simeon Polotskii.