This chapter first outlines the history of imperial and Soviet censorship, before analysing the complex interactions of the multiple state and Party institutions, and individuals, that characterised censorship during Stalinism and post-Stalinism. The influence of Soviet censorship was profound, but somewhat unpredictable: not all elements of the censorship worked in harmony, and lines of authority were sometimes blurred. Censorship very often simply prohibited publication: as a result, many of the most talented authors of the twentieth century were appreciated only posthumously. Censorship could also, however, shape literary texts by generating complex textual strategies for concealing and revealing hidden meanings. Moreover, it could produce multiple versions of texts, either through continued rewriting to keep up with changing official requirements, or through the unpredictable reproductions that became common within the self-publishing network of samizdat. This meant that definitive versions of many important twentieth-century texts only appeared after 1991.

The Russian ‘thick journal’, from its inception in the early 1800s to the present day, is at once a cultural institution, an index of intellectual life, and an important publishing mechanism. During the nineteenth century, the temporal focus of this chapter, Russia’s low literacy rate, poorly developed distribution networks, and virtual absence of inexpensive editions of high-quality literature gave the monthly thick journal a central place in Russian culture. From the 1840s until the 1880s, the thick journals published every subsequently canonical Russian novel except for Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, alongside works of criticism, history, philosophy, the natural sciences, and the social sciences, creating an expanding galaxy of discourses, many of which would migrate into the thematics and styles of the fictions they surrounded. That writers often began serialisation before completely drafting their novels made these fictions more open to such migration.

The Tale of Igor’s Campaign (Slovo o polku Igoreve) is a literary text that has acquired emblematic significance far beyond literature, in discourses of cultural and national identity in both Russia and Ukraine. It is short, fewer than ten pages of modern printed text, yet its status is incalculable. Its subject is not, on the surface, a hugely consequential event: a failed foray against the steppe nomads in 1185 led by a minor prince of the Rus ruling family, Igor Sviatoslavich of Novgorod-Seversk. Yet in the lyrical imagination, the episode acquires almost cosmic resonance. In the densely metaphorical narrative, nature itself participates and responds. Rus princes and nomad chieftains are falcons and wild oxen, skies darken, lances sing, rivers are invoked as if people, and the fingers of a bard are falcons descending upon swans.

This chapter argues that the brevity and inherent orality of the Russian short story allows for the introduction of new, often stigmatised subject matter and for experimentation with form and language. The short story laid the groundwork for the novel, but not by providing shorter pieces to be assembled into a more complex plot. Rather, its role was to work out innovative aesthetic and thematic models that the novel would later carry into the cultural mainstream. For this reason, the short story often came to the fore during periods of literary and ideological change. The chapter presents the evolution of the Russian short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Anton Chekhov, the author who finalised the shift to what we now recognise as the typical concerns of the modern short story.

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.