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Russian Literature — Babel Nexus Index

Literature / The Russian Novel & the Golden Age

A Level II literature chamber of the Babel Nexus Index · 22 primary public-domain works.

What Russian Literature argues

  • This is the hexagonal gallery of Russian Literature — the astonishing burst of genius that, in less than a century, carried Russia from a literary borrower to the summit of the European novel. It is the floor of Pushkin and Tolstoy, of Dostoevsky and Chekhov: a literature obsessed with the soul, with God and doubt, with guilt and freedom, and with the vast, suffering land that produced it.
  • It begins with Alexander Pushkin, the fountainhead, who forged a modern literary Russian almost single-handedly — in the verse novel Eugene Onegin, the taut prose tales, and the narrative poems — and with Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolai Gogol, who gave Russia its first great psychological hero and its first great satire. From Pushkin's clear spring flows everything that follows.
  • Then come the giants of the realist novel. Turgenev and Goncharov chart the twilight of the gentry; Dostoevsky descends into the underground of the divided self in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov; and Tolstoy raises the panorama of a whole civilization in War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Anton Chekhov closes the age, dissolving plot into mood and inventing the modern short story and the modern play.
  • Each card carries an authentic public-domain likeness of its author — Kiprensky's Pushkin, Perov's Dostoevsky, Kramskoi's Goncharov, Repin's Turgenev — and links to a public-domain edition on the Internet Archive. All twenty-two works are in the public domain.

Primary works in Russian Literature (22)

Chambers connected to Russian Literature

  • First Novels — Russian Literature is the supreme flowering of the realist novel. What the first novelists began, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev carried to its highest pitch — the novel as a total inquiry into society and the soul.
  • Poetry — The floor is rooted in verse. Pushkin and Lermontov were first and foremost poets, and Eugene Onegin is a novel written entirely in stanzas — the Russian novel is born out of Russian poetry.
  • First Plays — Anton Chekhov reinvented the theatre. Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard replace plot and melodrama with mood, subtext, and the drama of ordinary time — the foundation of modern drama.