History of Russian Literature
Old Russian literature consists of several sparse masterpieces written in the Old Russian language. Anonymous works of this nature include The Tale of Igor's Campaign and the Praying of Daniel the Immured Another popular genre of the Old Russian literature were the so called Lives of the saints. Life of Alexander Nevsky is one of the best known. Bylinas -- oral folk epics -- fused Christian and pagan traditions.
Medieval Russian literature had an overwhelmingly religious character and used an adapted form of the Church Slavonic language. The first work in colloquial Russian, the autobiography of archpriest Avvakum, emerged only in the mid-17th century.
The "Westernization" of Russia (commonly associated with the names of Tsar Peter the Great and Tsarina Catherine the Great) coincided with reform of the Russian alphabet and increased tolerance of the idea of employing the popular language for general literary purposes.
Romanticism permitted a flowering of especially poetic talent: the names of Zhukovsky and Pushkin came to the fore, followed by Mikhail Lermontov.
Other genres came to the fore with the approach of the 20th century. Anton Chekhov excelled in writing short stories and drama, and Anna Akhmatova represented innovative lyricists.
Sovietization of Russia affected literature after 1917. Maxim Gorky, Nobel Prize winner Mikhail Sholokhov, Valentin Kataev, Alexei Nikolaevich Tolstoi, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Ilf and Petrov came to prominence as part of Soviet literature.
In post-Stalin Russia Socialist realism remained the only permitted style; writers like Nobel Prize winner Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (who built his works on the legacy of the gulag camps) or Venedikt Erofeev continued the tradition of clandestine literature. Post-Communist Russia saw most of these works published and become a part of mainstream culture. However, even before the decay of the Soviet Union, tolerance to non-mainstream art had continuously started to grow. Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov published some material in the 1960s. Social criticism, as in the science fiction of the Strugatsky brothers and the literature of the Mitkis became popular. As another post-Stalin development, bard poetry developed.
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