Although those who came first chronologically in the history of eighteenth-century Russian literature – Antiokh Kantemir and Vasily Trediakovsky – initially wished to effect a radical break with their medieval tradition, much as Peter the Great had done in the political sphere, they could not manage it immediately. They initiated the transition to a modern literature, but it would take some time to accomplish, for the greatest literary figure of mid-century, Mikhail Lomonosov, was not so anxious as they to jettison native ways, and indeed eventually Trediakovsky too reverted to a greater sense of his roots than he had displayed in his youth, when under strong western European influence.

Although the church ceased to nurture literature directly in those years, it still continued to do so indirectly – through its schools, for example, which Lomonosov attended – and took an active hand in developing culture generally. Although literature was evidently much more secular in the eighteenth century than it had been earlier, there was still a serious religious component to it, one which emerged, for example, in Lomonosov’s “Morning meditation” and “Evening Meditation,” in Trediakovsky’s Feoptiya, and in Derzhavin’s ode “God,” promptly translated into many languages. Nor did it prove a simple matter to implant an understanding of literature as fiction: Kantemir had to explain carefully to the readers of his satires that his characters were but literary creations.

The period from 1895 to 1925, arguably the most complex in the entire history of Russian literature, may be characterized as the era of modernism in its various manifestations: decadence, symbolism, avant-gardism, futurism, acmeism, formalism, and a number of other doctrines, all of which were formulated by writers acutely conscious of culture as an entity created by human minds. The beginnings of Russian modernism are generally traced to an important critical piece of 1893 by Dmitry Merezhkovsky entitled On the reasons for the decline and on the new currents in contemporary Russian literature, an article which defined the new mood of the Russian intelligentsia, now prepared for a quite different sort of literature than it had welcomed theretofore. When modernism in its various forms did prevail, it held the stage for some time, even past the political cataclysms of the First World War and the October revolution: the literature of the early 1920s which dealt with these events still remained modernist in its approach until about 1925.

The year 1925 functions as a dividing point in literary terms for several reasons, of which two may be noted here. First, in that year the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed a resolution enunciating a comprehensive position on questions of literature and art. Although it did not actually exert its control at that stage over such matters, it asserted its right to do so in the future, and eventually did so.

The story of Russian literature begins with a date of great significance for Russian political and cultural history: the year 988, when the ruler of Kievan Rus officially accepted Christianity as the new faith of the principality. At that point there was no written literature in Rus, but by his action Prince Vladimir laid the foundations of what we now call medieval Russian literature, even though it would not come into real being – so far as we know from what has reached us after the destruction wrought by the Mongol invasion – for some years thereafter. But the eastern Slavs received an alphabet designed by SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, and also fell heir to the rich Byzantine cultural heritage which had been and would be translated from the Greek.

When we speak of “literature” in the old Russian period, however, we must understand it as something quite different from our notions of “literature” in the twentieth century.

In the first place, most old Russian literature was not what we would consider fictional, or at least it presented itself as dealing with fact and reality. In the earliest period one of the leading literary genres was the chronicle (exemplified by the Primary Chronicle) which built upon the achievements of the Byzantine historians. This genre by its very nature claimed to be factual even though it contained some clearly fictional (or at least non-factual) elements. Another leading genre was hagiography, which dealt with biographical accounts of the lives of Russia’s holy men and women: if a saint’s life contained fantastic elements, they were meant to be taken seriously, and not regarded as fiction.

The zenith of Russian realistic prose is treated here as beginning in 1855, a date of political significance, the year in which Nicholas I passed from the scene, but also of literary importance, as the year which saw the publication of Chernyshevsky’s Esthetic Relations of Art to Reality. That essay formulated the principles upon which literary critics, by then quite numerous, would judge and interpret the literary masterpieces shortly to be produced. Chernyshevsky’s was a straight-forwardly materialist esthetic, based on the central propositions that “the beautiful is life” and that art is in every meaningful sense inferior to a reality subject to rational comprehension. His critical followers elaborated upon his ideas with such enthusiasm that by 1865 his doctrine had become the dominant critical view. Even those numerous critics and even more numerous writers who rejected Chernyshevsky’s approach had to take it into serious account, and in this sense his ideas defined the course of the literary discussion in large measure until about 1870.

The years from 1855 to 1880 were the time when the Russian realists flourished. A mere listing of names is sufficient to make the point: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Pisemsky, Ostrovsky, Leskov – the literary careers of all these reached their peak during this quarter-century. It was also a stimulating period for criticism, with critics of sufficient stature at least to compare with the writers they interpreted: Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and Pisarev among the radicals, Grigorev among their opponents.

The decade of the 1980s divides neatly into two equal halves. Over the first half hung the shadow of the gloomy “period of stagnation” which is rightly associated with the name of Leonid Brezhnev, one of the most dull-witted and predatory political figures of this century.

Brezhnev wanted to be a writer. In 1978–79 he published his auto-biographical sketches Malaya zemlya (the name given to a portion of the Kerch Peninsula, scene of fierce fighting during World War II, where Brezhnev was a political commissar), Rebirth (Vozrozhdenie), and Virgin Lands (Tselina). Although they were nothing more than brochures written in bureaucratese by ghostwriters, Brezhnev was immediately honored with a Lenin Prize, the highest Soviet literary award. Moreover, the literary journals and papers in Russia outdid one another in extolling the author of this “trilogy,” holding up his talent as an example for all, exclaiming over his brilliant metaphors, his vivid epithets and similes, and his lively dialogue. Moscow and Leningrad writers would gather for solemn discussions of the Brezhnev “trilogy” in obedience to party command.

Is it any wonder that so-called “secretarial literature” flourished luxuriantly at precisely this time? If everybody agreed that the country’s leading writer was the incredibly mediocre and perhaps even only semi-literate General Secretary of the party Central Committee, then what was to prevent the various Secretaries of the Union of Soviet Writers from publishing their writings in multi-volume editions? To be sure, Brezhnev exercised such unlimited power that he could award himself a Lenin prize, while the secretaries of the Writers Union could not do as much – but still they controlled such publishing houses as “Soviet Writer,” “Artistic Literature,” and “Young Guard.”

The 1840s – that “marvellous decade,” in Paul Annenkov’s phrase – occupy a special place in the historical memory of the Russian intelligentsia. For most of its length the decade was a time of great philosophical, cultural, and literary beginnings, which then came to an abrupt ending in the so-called “epoch of censorship terror” commencing with the European revolutions of 1848 and continuing through Russia’s losing involvement in the Crimean war of 1853–6. The second portion of the years from 1840 to 1855 transformed the entire period from a beginning to something more like a transition, from the great years of romanticism to the time of the Russian realists who would win for Russian literature a worldwide reputation. It was also a period of continuing transition from an age of poetry to an epoch when prose writing dominated the literary arena.

Philosophically, the early 1840s were a time when young Russians eagerly followed and endlessly discussed all the latest theories, emanating especially from Germany. Young people formally enrolled in universities found it much more interesting to spend their hours participating in small “circles” and all-night debates about the good, the true and the beautiful, than attending classes. That frame of mind is epitomized in Turgenev’s vignette of an instance when he and Belinsky were summoned to dinner by Belinsky’s wife and the critic objected to being interrupted for a meal when the two of them had not yet settled the question of God’s existence.

If the year which begins this period – 1925 – has both literary and political significance, as the year when the newly established communist regime asserted its authority over literature and culture, the ending date is primarily of political significance: it is the year of Joseph Stalin’s death. A political date is quite appropriate to close this era of Russian literature, during which literature and politics were more intimately interconnected than at any other time during the entire span of Russian literary history.

The political pressures of the early Soviet era brought about the division of Russian literature into two major if unequal parts: the principal one of Russian literature within the Soviet Union, and the lesser one of the “first wave” of the emigration which began to assume definite form around 1925. When the first wave later subsided – as some writers returned to the Soviet Union during the 1930s or after the Second World War, others died natural deaths or perished during that conflict, and the major centers of émigré culture between the wars were disrupted by that historical cataclysm – it was suddenly reinforced by the so-called “second wave” of the emigration resulting from the dislocations of that very conflict. The “second wave” contained few established writers, but it did provide a much larger audience than before for émigré literature, and boasted a number of talented people who managed to establish themselves as writers later on. The second wave of the emigration was more or less at its height at the time of Stalin’s death.

This volume is unlike any which has preceded it. Earlier volumes have covered the whole of the Mediterranean and Near East. We hardly stray beyond Greece, deferring developments elsewhere to Volume VI. We are thus stressing that this is a period when, for the first and last time before the Romans, great political and military power on the one hand and cultural importance on the other, including the presence of historians to describe that power, are located in the same place. By contrast, Persia and the empires which preceded it were powerful but not articulate; the Jews were articulate but not powerful. This gives the volume a coherence which its predecessors and immediate successors lack.

Some of the coherence arises from the nature of our sources, which make an Athenian standpoint hard to avoid. That point was noticed by Sallust in the first century B.C.:

As I reckon it, the actions of the Athenians were indeed vast and magnificent, but rather less substantial than report makes them. But because writers of genius grew up there, Athenian deeds are renowned as the greatest throughout the world. The talent of those who did them is judged by the powers of praise of these outstanding literary geniuses. (Bell. Cat. 8.2—4)