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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?