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.

Labour camps, known for most of their seven decades by the acronym GULag (Main Administration of Camps), were a defining feature of the Soviet system, and one of its most baleful legacies. Concentrated in peripheral, hostile environments, they showed disregard for human life and health and resulted in mass death and disability. The release of millions from the camps, especially in the amnesties of the early post-Stalin years (1953–6), created a vast network of survivors, with many seeking to testify to their experiences.

Walking down an aisle of a Russian bookstore or library, one sees numerous books with the title Rasskazy i povesti. This common title for an author’s collected works is difficult to translate: it could be ‘short stories and short novels’ or ‘short and long stories’. As these awkward pairings show, the povest' occupies the space between the short story and the novel, both in length and in the scope of its engagement with its subject.

The terms ‘salon’ and ‘circle’ refer to a particular type of literary group that has shaped Russian culture since the seventeenth century, with its influence peaking in the 1820s and 1830s. Unlike literary societies, these communities have rarely had any formal membership, written rules or programmatic documents. Instead, they have tended to favour friendly chats on various subjects, literary recitations, and discussions on certain days of week, sometimes accompanied by musical performances. These practices engender strong personal bonds and shared memories. Some of these communities have created their own ‘circle languages’ with recurrent motifs, inside jokes, and domestic mythologies, which in turn have framed their literary output. The chapter reconstructs their activities by examining that output alongside secret-police reports. Viewed from this perspective, the history of literary circles and salons can be seen as the history of the vanished ‘everyday life’ of their participants.

During the age of devotion, monasteries were the dominant institutions for the production, preservation, and consumption of books. This chapter uses a spatial device to map the character and range of monastic writing and reading. Monastic book consumption is described in terms of three zones. The first zone is the church, with the books needed for the performance of the liturgy and to support services every day of the year. The second zone can be represented by the refectory or other communal space, where the monastic Rule advised that, rather than engage in idle chatter, the brethren should listen to the reading of instructive and edifying texts. The third zone is the individual cell, the zone of texts for private reading. The chapter’s main temporal focus is on the period from the late fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century, the main age of monastic expansion.

This chapter examines the history of the Russian novel after 1900 as a cyclical reworking or recycling of two traditions stretching back to the nineteenth century. The first, harmonious tradition is associated with Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Lev Tolstoi, while the second, disharmonious one follows the examples of Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Leskov, and Fedor Dostoevskii. The Modernist novel inherited the second trend in the early twentieth century, while the Socialist Realist novel tried to inherit the first one thereafter. The post-Stalinist critical novel combined both trends, and more recently the Postmodernist novel has thrived on a programmatic break from national traditions. In turn, this liberation has coincided with the end of literocentrism in Russia, as the novel has ceased to be the repository and domain of national identity, and instead become an arena for play, fantasy, imagination, modelling, and learning – a space of freedom.

This chapter examines the phenomenon that has become known as samizdat: the self-publishing of secular literature as a reaction to state censorship in the second half of the twentieth century. Samizdat is conceptualised as a means by which Soviet citizens procured what the centrally organised cultural sphere would not provide: interesting or informative texts that people wanted to read. The chapter provides detail on famous texts that were first circulated in samizdat, on different genres of samizdat such as literary journals, and on the manufacturing and distribution of samizdat materials, including ‘tamizdat’ or the smuggling into the USSR of books printed abroad. Ultimately, samizdat emerges not merely as a way of distributing texts, but also as a network of grassroots networks – a way for people to organise outside official channels in the context of a system which suppressed private and civic initiative.

This chapter argues that the spoken word had special significance in the Russian literary tradition due to censorship and other constraints on the printed word, and also because of the cultural chasm between a small, educated elite and a weakly literate majority. It begins with Baroque rhetoric in the eighteenth century before examining the role of oral performance and rhetoric in the Romantic era. It then shows a reinvigoration of literature’s oral dimension from the reform era of the 1860s through to the early twentieth century, as writers became public readers of their work and the educated elite sought to render a popular ‘voice’ in literary form. Following a repressive hiatus in the Stalin period, the spoken word had its heyday in the postwar era: guitar poetry, a popular form of urban folklore, entered the field of literature, while poets achieved national fame as performers as well as published authors.

It is a truism to say that medieval literature was largely anonymous. Chronicles accumulated over the centuries without indication of author or compiler. Scores of saints’ lives were composed, expanded, redacted, and paraphrased by unnamed writers and editors. It can be surprising, therefore, to find that the use of the first-person singular is not as uncommon as the truism might imply. Who is he (the first-person singular is almost invariably male), and what are his roles and functions?

The figure of the madman has been invoked in Russian literature from the medieval period to the present day. This chapter investigates the evolution of that tradition with an emphasis on the period from Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. It identifies four strains of literary madness: the divine madman, exemplified by the holy fool who tests society’s virtue and speaks truth to power; the creative madman, whose irrational behaviour stems from poetic inspiration and the generative power of the word; the rational madman, who follows a logical system to pathological extremes or inverts that paradigm by revolting against reason; and the political madman, whose sanity is often pathologised by a society that itself has lost its mind. Together, these paradigms of madness constitute an intertextual web of allusions and character types that have been embodied and amended over time.

The peasant as a protagonist in Russian literature emerged in the late eighteenth century in comic operas and Nikolai Karamzin’s short fiction. By the 1850s, the genre of ‘stories from the life of peasants’ had become widespread, and included the depiction of Ukrainian peasants. Its popularity hinged on the fact that peasant ‘other’ came to serve as an idealised image of national character. This chapter focuses in most detail on the period between the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 and the Russian Revolution in 1917, when the models used for depicting peasants were most diverse, and the ‘grey muzhik’, or average peasant, featured in the work of many writers. Under Stalin, the free-labour peasant disappeared from Russian literature due to collectivisation and repressions, only to re-emerge in the Village Prose of the late Soviet period as writers transformed citizens of collective farms into nostalgic images of a lost Russia.

This typological survey of Asian Christologies examines leading missionaries and theological writers about Jesus from antiquity to the present. It raises critical hermeneutical issues regarding the indigenized faces of Jesus, Asian soteriological engagement with sociopolitical and religious contexts, and the role of languages and arts in Asian understandings of Jesus Christ. Jesus bears many faces, but his church in Asia – as is true also in other continents – remains dynamically catholic as well as indigenized – and precisely this dialogical tension of universality and indigeneity makes the church authentic and its mission transformative.