Russian, like Western Realism, is best understood as a reaction against Romanticism, as an attempt, then, to reach out to topical mundane reality (Balzac's actualité), renouncing romantic fantasy or escape into an imaginary past and Sentimentalism's abstract discourses on virtue. Realism meant a concern with concrete Russian life, while Romanticism often pursued the exotic and Sentimentalism dealt with humanity in the abstract. In contrast to Romanticism's preoccupation with the extraordinary individual, Realism meant an interest in the concerns of ordinary men and women, in social problems and in the life of the lower classes. Also, Realism meant a faith in literature's calling to be involved in the affairs of real life.

The Russian realist novel, like the realist novel in the West, grew out of existing genres, while often using them as a foil. Gogol's Dead Souls (1842) is formally a picaresque novel. Dostoevskii's Poor Folk (1846) uses the sentimentalist form of the epistolary novel. His The Double (1846) is a “realized”version of a Gothic novel. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840) and Tolstoi's Cossacks (1863) “realize” the exotic novel made popular by Aleksandr Bestuzhev-Marlinskii in the 1830s.

In no other major literature has a critic whose entire literary life was essentially that of a hack journalist had even remotely the influence which V. G. Belinsky (1811–48) has had and still has in Russia. This is true both in a vertical and in a horizontal sense. Belinsky became an authority in his lifetime and was a living force, who elicited active response pro and con, throughout the nineteenth century. His ideas were revived, successively, in the Marxist aesthetics of G. V. Plekhanov and his followers, such as A. V. Lunacharsky and V V. Vorovsky, in the criticism of the Pereval group of the 1920s, and in the liberal practices of the post-Thaw period. Also, Belinsky has been since the beginning of the Soviet period, and still is, the most often quoted authority on nineteenth-century literature as well as on questions of aesthetics and literary theory. Even more remarkable is the fact that Belinsky would be a living antagonist to such diverse twentieth-century figures as A. A.Blok, V B. Shklovsky, D. S. Mirsky, and D. I. Chizhevsky. In a horizontal plane, the Russian literary traditions of the Left, Center, and Right with almost equal emphasis have claimed as well as practiced a faithful adherence to Belinsky's principles.

Actually, the Left, represented by N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobroliubov, D. I. Pisarev, and a host of others, who all claimed discipleship most vociferously, was farthest removed from Belinsky, as Plekhanov was to show.

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.