Early post-Revolutionary era The first years of the Soviet regime after the
October Revolution of 1917, featured a proliferation of
Russian avant-garde literary groups, and
proletarian literature receive official support. The
Imaginists were post-Revolution poetic movement, similar to English-language
Imagists, that created poetry based on sequences of arresting and uncommon images. The major figures include
Sergei Yesenin,
Anatoly Marienhof, and
Rurik Ivnev. Another important movement was the
Oberiu (1927–1930s), which included the most famous Russian absurdist
Daniil Kharms (1905–1942),
Konstantin Vaginov (1899–1934),
Alexander Vvedensky (1904–1941) and
Nikolay Zabolotsky (1903–1958). Other famous authors experimenting with language included the novelists
Boris Pilnyak (1894–1938),
Yuri Olesha (1899–1960),
Andrei Platonov (1899–1951) and
Artyom Vesyoly (1899–1938), the short-story writers
Isaak Babel (1894–1940) and
Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894–1958). The
OPOJAZ group of literary critics, a part of
Russian formalism school, was founded in 1916 in close connection with
Russian Futurism. Two of its members also produced influential literary works, namely
Viktor Shklovsky, whose numerous books (
A Sentimental Journey and
Zoo, or Letters Not About Love, both 1923) defy genre in that they present a novel mix of narration, autobiography, and aesthetic as well as social commentary, and
Yury Tynyanov (1893–1943), who used his knowledge of Russia's literary history to produce a set of historical novels mainly set in the Pushkin era (e.g.,
Lieutenant Kijé,
Pushkin in three parts, 1935–43, and others). Following the establishment of
Bolshevik rule,
Vladimir Mayakovsky worked on interpreting the facts of the new reality. His works, such as "Ode to the Revolution" and "Left March" (both 1918), brought innovations to poetry. In "Left March", Mayakovsky calls for a struggle against the enemies of the Russian Revolution. The poem
150 000 000 (1921) discusses the leading role played by the masses in the revolution. In the poem
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924), Mayakovsky looks at the life and work at the leader of Russia's revolution and depicts them against a broad historical background. In the poem
All Right! (1927), Mayakovsky writes about
socialist society as the "springtime of humanity". Mayakovsky was instrumental in producing a new type of poetry in which politics played a major part. One of the most popular Soviet poets during the 1920s was
Nikolai Tikhonov (1896–1979), a future important figure of Stalinist era, well-known for his
Ballad About Nails, as follows:
Émigré writers Usually, Russian
émigré literature is understood as the works of the
white émigré, namely the first post-Revolutionary wave, although in the broad sense of the word, it also includes
Soviet dissidents of the late years through the 1980s. Meanwhile, émigré writers, such as poets
Georgy Ivanov,
Vyacheslav Ivanov,
Vladislav Khodasevich,
surrealist Boris Poplavsky (1903–1935), and members of the 1920s–50s Paris Note (French:
Note parisienne) Russian poetry movement (
Georgy Adamovich, Igor Chinnov,
George Ivask,
Anatoly Shteiger, Lidia Tcherminskaia); novelists such as
M. Ageyev,
Mark Aldanov,
Gaito Gazdanov,
Pyotr Krasnov,
Aleksandr Kuprin,
Dmitry Merezhkovsky,
Aleksey Remizov,
Ivan Shmelyov,
George Grebenstchikoff,
Yevgeny Zamyatin,
Vladimir Nabokov, and English-speaking
Ayn Rand; and short-story
Nobel Prize-winning writer and poet
Ivan Bunin, continued to write in exile. During his emigration, Bunin wrote his most significant works, such as his only autobiographical novel
The Life of Arseniev (1927–1939) and short story cycle
Dark Avenues (1937–1944). An example of long prose form is Grebenstchikoff's epic novel
The Churaevs in six volumes (1922–1937) in which he described life of the
Siberians.
M. Ageyev is known for his
Novel with Cocaine (1934). While the realists Bunin, Shmelyov and Grebenstchikoff wrote about the pre-revolutionary Russia, life of the émigrés was depicted in modernist Nabokov's
Mary (1926)
and The Gift (1938), Gazdanov's
An Evening with Claire (1929) and
The Specter of Alexander Wolf (1948) and Georgy Ivanov's novel
Disintegration of the Atom (1938).
Stalinist era In the 1930s,
Socialist realism became the predominant official trend in the Soviet Union. Writers like those of the
Serapion Brothers group (1921–), who insisted on the right of an author to write independently of political ideology, were forced by authorities to reject their views and accept socialist realist principles. Some 1930s writers, such as
Osip Mandelstam,
Daniil Kharms, leader of
Oberiu,
Leonid Dobychin,
Mikhail Bulgakov, author of
The White Guard (1923) and
The Master and Margarita (1928–1940), and
Andrei Platonov, author of novels
Chevengur (1928) and
The Foundation Pit (1930) were attacked by the official critics as "formalists," "naturalists" and ideological enemies and wrote with little or no hope of being published. Such remarkable writers as
Isaac Babel,
Boris Pilnyak,
Nikolai Klyuev,
Sergey Klychkov, Pyotr Oreshin and
Artyom Vesyoly, who continued to publish their works but could not get used to the socrealist principles by the end of the 1930s, were executed on fabricated charges, and Osip Mandelstam, Daniil Kharms and
Alexander Vvedensky died in prison. The return from emigration such famous authors as
Aleksey Tolstoy,
Maxim Gorky, and
Ilya Ehrenburg was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets. After his return to Russia Maxim Gorky was proclaimed by the Soviet authorities as "the founder of Socialist Realism". His novel
Mother (1906), which Gorky himself considered one of his biggest failures, inspired proletarian writers to found the socrealist movement. Gorky defined socialist realism as the "realism of people who are rebuilding the world" and pointed out that it looks at the past "from the heights of the future's goals", although he defined it not as a strict style (which is studied in
Andrei Sinyavsky's essay
On Socialist Realism), but as a label for the "union of writers of styles", who write for one purpose, to help in the development of the
new man in socialist society. Gorky became the initiator of creating the Writer's Union, a state organization, intended to unite the socrealist writers. Despite the official reputation, Gorky's post-revolutionary works, such as the novel
The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936) can't be defined as socrealist, but
modernist.
Andrei Bely (1880–1934), author of
Petersburg (1913/1922), a well-known modernist writer, also was a member of Writer's Union and tried to become a "true" socrealist by writing a series of articles and making ideological revisions to his memoirs, and he also planned to begin a study of Socialist realism; however, he continued writing with his unique techniques. Although he was actively published during his lifetime, his major works would not be reissued until the end of the 1970s.
Valentin Kataev, who began publishing before the Revolution, is the author of the first Soviet "industrial novel"
Time, Forward! (1932) and the classic 1946 short story
Our Father.
Mikhail Sholokhov (1905–1984) was one of the most significant figures in the official Soviet literature. His main socrealist work is
Virgin Soil Upturned (1935), a novel in which Sholokhov glorifies the collectivization. However, his unique for period best-known and the most significant literary achievement is
Quiet Flows the Don (1928–40), an epic novel which realistically depicts the life of
Don Cossacks during the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Russian Civil War.
Nikolai Ostrovsky's novel
How the Steel Was Tempered (1932–1934) has been among the most popular and standard works of literary socrealism, with tens of millions of copies printed in many languages around the world. In China, various versions of the book have sold more than 10 million copies. In Russia more than 35 million copies of the book are in circulation. The book is a fictionalized autobiography of Ostrovsky's life: he had a difficult working-class childhood, became a
Komsomol member in July 1919 and volunteered to join the
Red Army. The novel's protagonist, Pavel Korchagin, represented the "young hero" of Russian literature: he is dedicated to his political causes, which help him to overcome his tragedies.
Alexander Fadeyev (1901–1956) was also a well-known Socialist realism writer, the chairman of the official Writer's Union during Stalinist era. His novel
The Rout (1927) deals with the partisan struggle in
Russia's Far East during the Russian Revolution and Civil War of 1917–1922. Fadeyev described the theme of this novel as one of a revolution significantly transforming the
masses. In the 1930s,
Konstantin Paustovsky (1892–1968), an influenced by
neo-Romantic works of
Alexander Grin master of landscape prose, a singer of the
Meshchera Lowlands, and already in the post-Stalin years a multiple nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, joined the ranks of leading Soviet writers.fantastic. Novelist and playwright
Leonid Leonov, despite the fact that he was considered by authorities to be one of the pillars of socialist realism, during the Stalin years, created a forbidden novella about emigrants
Eugenua Ivanovna (1938), a play about the
Chekist purges,
The Snowstorm (1940), briefly permitted and then also forbidden, and a novel,
The Russian Forest (1953), where ecological issues were perhaps touched upon for the first time in Soviet literature. Over the course of forty years (1940–1994), he wrote a huge philosophical and mystical novel, "The Pyramid", which was finished and published in the year of the author's death. The cult figures of the literature of the Second World War were the
war poets
Konstantin Simonov, arguably most famous for his 1941 poem
Wait for Me, and
Aleksandr Tvardovsky, author of the long poem "
Vasily Terkin" (1941–45), chief editor of the literary magazine
Novy Mir. Poet
Yulia Drunina known for writing about women at war.
Boris Polevoy is the author of the
Story About a True Man (1946), based on the life of World War II fighter pilot
Aleksey Maresyev, which was an immensely popular.
Late Soviet era After the end of World War II Nobel Prize-winning
Boris Pasternak (1890–1960) wrote a novel
Doctor Zhivago (1945–1955). Publication of the novel in Italy caused a scandal, as the Soviet authorities forced Pasternak to renounce his 1958 Nobel Prize and denounced as an internal White emigre and a Fascist fifth columnist. Pasternak was expelled from the Writer's Union. The majority of members of the Writers' Union (
Georgi Markov,
Anatoly Rybakov,
Aleksandr Chakovsky,
Sergey Zalygin, Anatoly Kalinin,
Daniil Granin,
Yuri Nagibin,
Vladimir Tendryakov, Arkady Lvov (before his emigration),
Chinghiz Aitmatov,
Anatoly Ivanov, Pyotr Proskurin, Boris Yekimov, among many others) continued to work in the mainstream of Socialist Realism, not without criticizing certain phenomena of Soviet reality, such as showiness, mismanagement, nepotism, and widespread poaching. However, even in officially recognized literature, not entirely canonical "mutations"—the natural
Lieutenant, nostalgic
Village and intellectual "Urban Prose" (
Yury Trifonov), the literature of the
Sixtiers and "Quiet Poetry" movements appear. Since the 1960s,
Valentin Kataev has been moving away from official realism, developing his own modernist style, "Mauvism" (from the French word
mauvais, "bad"). The
Khrushchev Thaw () brought some fresh wind to literature (the term was coined after
Ilya Ehrenburg's 1954 novel
The Thaw). Published in 1956,
Vladimir Dudintsev's novel
Not by Bread Alone and
Yury Dombrovsky's
The Keeper of Antiquities in 1964 became two of the main literary events of the Thaw and a milestone in the process of
de-Stalinization, but was soon criticized and withdrawn from circulation. The last years of life were fruitful for
Nikolay Zabolotsky, who was repressed during the Stalin years. The publication in 1962 of the philosophical novelist
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's debut story
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich about a political prisoner became a national and international sensation. Poetry of the
Sixtiers or Russian New Wave became a
mass-cultural phenomenon:
Bella Akhmadulina,
Boris Slutsky,
Victor Sosnora,
Robert Rozhdestvensky,
Andrei Voznesensky, and
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, read their poems in stadiums and attracted huge crowds, as follows: Such exponents of neo-
Acmeist poetry as
Arseny Tarkovsky,
Semyon Lipkin,
David Samoylov,
Alexander Kushner and
Oleg Chukhontsev, the representatives "quiet poetry" Anatoly Zhigulin,
Stanislav Kunyaev,
Nikolay Rubtsov and Yury Kuznetsov, and also Gleb Gorbovsky,
bard Novella Matveyeva,
Yunna Morits, and Gleb Semenov's lyrical poetry also stood apart from the socrealist mainstream. The
Village Prose was a movement in Soviet literature beginning during the Khrushchev Thaw, which included works that cultivated nostalgia of rural life.
Valentin Ovechkin's story
District Routine (1952), expose managerial inefficiency, the self-interest of party functionaries, was the starting point of the movement. Its major members
Alexander Yashin,
Fyodor Abramov,
Boris Mozhayev,
Viktor Astafyev,
Vladimir Soloukhin,
Vasily Shukshin,
Vasily Belov, and
Valentin Rasputin clustered in the traditionalist and nationalist
Nash Sovremennik literary magazine. Since 1985/86, the
Perestroika—a period of great changes in the political and cultural life in the USSR—gave way to a wide diversity of banned previously and new writings. In 1986 there was established the legal non-Realistic literary club "Poetry", among its members were
Dmitry Prigov,
Igor Irtenyev, Aleksandr Yeryomenko,
Sergey Gandlevsky, and Yuri Arabov. Many previously suppressed works were published among first, in 1986–87, anti-Stalinist
Alexander Bek's novel
The New Appointment (1965) and Anatoly Rybakov's
Children of the Arbat trilogy. The events of the
theater of the absurd were postmodern plays of
Nina Sadur. Among the best writers of "alternative fiction," openly discussing previously taboo themes, were Mikhail Kurayev (b. 1939),
Valery Popov,
Tatyana Tolstaya, and
Viktor Yerofeyev.
Soviet nonconformism Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, like short-story writer
Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982) and Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), who wrote about life in the
gulag camps, or
Vasily Grossman (1905–1964), with his description of World War II events countering the Soviet official historiography (his epic novel
Life and Fate (1959) was not published in the Soviet Union until the
perestroika). Such writers, dubbed "
dissidents", could not publish their major works until the 1960s. Modernist and
Postmodern dissident literature was related and partially coincided with the
Soviet nonconformist art movement. From 1953 to 1957, the
Mansard Group—first unofficial poetry group—existed till its leader Leonid Chertkov (1933–2000) was imprisoned, among other members Galina Andreeva (1933–2016) and Stanislav Krasovitsky (b. 1935). Another poetry group of '50s in Leningrad was the
Philological School that included Mikhail Eremin (1936–2022), Sergey Kulle (1936–1984), Leonid Vinogradov (1936–2004) and poet and artist
Vladimir Uflyand (1937–2007). Some poets were both artists or participants and inspirers of art groups, such as Evgenii Kropivnitsky (1893–1979),
Igor Kholin,
Genrikh Sapgir,
Vilen Barskyi (1930–2012), Roald Mandelstam (1932–1961), Vsevolod Nekrasov (1934–2009), Mikhail Eremin (1936–2022),
Igor Sinyavin (1937–2000),
Alexei Khvostenko (1940–2004),
Dmitry Prigov (1940–2007), Kari Unksova (1941–1983),
Ry Nikonova (1942–2014),
Oleg Grigoriev (1943–1992), Valery Kholodenko (1945–1993),
Serge Segay (1947–2014), and
Vladimir Sorokin (b. 1955). But the late 1950s thaw did not last long. In the 1970s, some of the most prominent authors were not only banned from publishing but were also prosecuted for their anti-Soviet sentiments, or for
parasitism, thus writers
Yuli Daniel (1925–1988) and
Leonid Borodin (1938–2011) was imprisoned. Solzhenitsyn and Nobel Prize–winning poet
Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) were expelled from the country. Others, such as writers and poets David Dar (1910–1980),
Viktor Nekrasov (1911–1987),
Lev Kopelev (1912–1997),
Aleksandr Galich (1918–1977),
Arkadiy Belinkov (1921–2019), Elizaveta Mnatsakanova (1922–2006),
Alexander Zinoviev (1922–2006),
Naum Korzhavin (1925–2018),
Andrei Sinyavsky (1925–1997), Arkady Lvov (1927–2020),
Yuz Aleshkovsky (1929–2022),
Anatoly Kuznetsov (1929–1979), Vilen Barskyi,
Vladimir Maksimov (1930–1995),
Yuri Mamleev (1931–2015),
Georgi Vladimov (1931–2003),
Vasily Aksyonov (1932–2009),
Vladimir Voinovich (1932–2018), Leonid Chertkov,
Anatoly Gladilin (1935–2018),
Anri Volokhonsky (1936–2017), Vadim Kreid (b. 1936),
Andrei Bitov (1937–2018), Igor Sinyavin, Alexei Khvostenko,
Sergei Dovlatov (1941–1990),
Eduard Limonov (1943–2020), and
Sasha Sokolov (b. 1943), had to emigrate to the West, while Oleg Grigoriev and
Venedikt Yerofeyev (1938–1990) "emigrated" to alcoholism, and repressed still in Stalinist years poet Yury Aikhenvald (1928–1993) with some others to translations, and Kari Unksova and
Yury Dombrovsky (1909–1978) were murdered, Dombrovsky shortly after publishing his novel
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975). Their books were not published officially until the
perestroika period of the 1980s, although fans continued to reprint them manually in a manner called "
samizdat" (self-publishing). In 1960s arose unofficial Soviet
second Russian avant-garde and
Russian postmodernism. In 1965–72, at Leningrad existed the avantgardist
Absurdist poetic and writing group "Khelenkuts", which included Vladimir Erl and Aleksandr Mironov, among others. Andrei Bitov was Postmodernism first proponent. In 1970, Venedikt Erofeyev's
surrealist postmodern prose poem
Moscow-Petushki was published via
samizdat. The Soviet emigrant Sasha Sokolov wrote surrealist
A School for Fools in 1973 and the completely postmodern novel
Between Dog and Wolf in 1980. Other remarkable postmodern novels were Eduard Limonov's ''
It's Me, Eddie'', Vladimir Voinovich's
The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin, Vasily Aksyonov's
The Island of Crimea and
Vladimir Sorokin's
The Norm. Sergei Dovlatov,
Valery Popov, and
Yevgeni Popov predominantly wrote short stories. Since '70s there were such postmodern unofficial movements as
Moscow Conceptualists with elements of
concrete poetry (Vsevolod Nekrasov, Dmitry Prigov, writer and literary scholar
Viktor Yerofeyev,
Lev Rubinstein, Timur Kibirov, early Vladimir Sorokin) and
Metarealism, namely metaphysical realism, used complex metaphors which they called meta-metaphors (Konstantin Kedrov,
Viktor Krivulin, Elena Katsyuba, Ivan Zhdanov,
Elena Shvarts, Vladimir Aristov, Aleksandr Yeryomenko, scholar Svetlana Kekova,
Yuri Arabov,
Alexei Parshchikov, Sergei Nadeem and Nikolai Kononov).
Arkadii Dragomoshchenko is considered the foremost representative of the
Language Poets in Russian literature. In
Yeysk, there was the "Transfurist" group of mixing verbal,
sound and
visual poetry (Ry Nikonova and Serge Segay, among others). As mentioned Leonid Vinogradov, as well as members of
List of characters group Mikhail Faynerman and Ivan Akhmetyev were exponents of
Minimalist verse. The banned from publishing
Chuvash and Russian poet
Gennadiy Aygi had been creating experimental surrealist verses Although the view of Earth's future as that of utopian communist society was the only view that was welcome, the liberties of genre still offered a loophole for free expression. Books of brothers
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and
Kir Bulychev, among others, are reminiscent of social problems and often include satire of contemporary Soviet society.
Ivan Yefremov, on the contrary, arose to fame with his
utopian views on future as well as on
Ancient Greece in his
historical novels. The Strugatskies are also credited for the Soviet's first
science fantasy, the
Monday Begins on Saturday trilogy. Other notable science fiction writers included
Vladimir Savchenko, Georgy Gurevich,
Alexander Kazantsev, Georgy Martynov,
Yeremey Parnov.
Space opera was less developed, since both state censors and serious writers watched it unfavorably. Nevertheless, there were moderately successful attempts to adapt space westerns to Soviet soil. The first was Alexander Kolpakov with "Griada", after came
Sergey Snegov with "Men Like Gods", among others. A specific branch of both science fiction and children's books appeared in mid-Soviet era: the children's science fiction. It was meant to educate children while entertaining them. The star of the genre was Bulychov, who, along with his adult books, created children's space adventure series about
Alisa Selezneva, a teenage girl from the future. Others include
Nikolay Nosov with his books about dwarf
Neznayka, Evgeny Veltistov, who wrote about
robot boy Electronic, Vitaly Melentyev,
Vladislav Krapivin,
Vitaly Gubarev.
Mystery was another popular genre.
Detectives by
Vayner Brothers and
spy novels by
Yulian Semyonov were best-selling, and many of them were adapted into film or TV in the 1970s and 1980s.
Village Prose is a genre that conveys nostalgic descriptions of rural life.
Valentin Rasputin's 1976 novel,
Proshchaniye s Matyoroy (
Farewell to Matyora) depicted a village faced with destruction to make room for a hydroelectric plant.
Historical fiction in the early Soviet era included a large share of
memoirs, fictionalized or not.
Valentin Katayev and
Lev Kassil wrote semi-autobiographic books about children's life in Tsarist Russia.
Vladimir Gilyarovsky wrote
Moscow and Muscovites, about life in pre-revolutionary Moscow. There were also attempts to write an epic novel about the Revolution, similar to Leo Tolstoy's
War and Peace, based on the writers' own experience. Aleksey Tolstoy's
The Road to Calvary (1920–1941) and
Mikhail Sholokhov's
And Quiet Flows the Don (1928–1940) depict Russia from the start of the Revolution to the end of the Civil War.
The Road to Calvary demonstrates the victory of socialist ideas, while
And Quiet Flows the Don gives a realist and a brutal image.
Maxim Gorky's and
Andrei Bely's experimental novels
The Life of Klim Samgin (1925–1936) and
Moscow (1926–1931) trace the relationship of Russian
intelligentsia with the revolutionary movement. Mikhail Bulgakov conceived to write a trilogy about the Civil War, but wrote only the first part,
The White Guard (1923).
Yury Tynyanov focused on fictional biographies of the Golden Age writers:
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar (1928) and
Pushkin (1935–1943). The late Soviet historical fiction was dominated by World War II novels and short stories by authors such as the representatives of
Lieutenant prose (such as
Vasil Bykov),
Vasily Grossman,
Konstantin Simonov,
Boris Vasilyev,
Viktor Astafyev, among others, based on the authors' own war experience.
Vasily Yan and
Konstantin Badygin are best known for their novels on Medieval Rus, and
Yury Tynyanov for writing on Russian Empire.
Valentin Pikul wrote about many different epochs and countries in an
Alexander Dumas-inspired style. In the 1970s there appeared a relatively independent
Village Prose, whose most prominent representatives were
Viktor Astafyev and
Valentin Rasputin. Any sort of fiction that dealt with the occult, either
horror, adult-oriented fantasy or
magic realism, was unwelcome in Soviet Russia. Until the 1980s very few books in these genres were written, and even fewer were published, although earlier books, such as by Gogol, were not banned. Of the rare exceptions, Bulgakov in
Master and Margarita (not published in author's lifetime) and Strugatskies in
Monday Begins on Saturday introduced magic and mystical creatures into contemporary Soviet reality to satirize it. Another exception was early Soviet writer
Alexander Grin, who wrote
neo-Romantic tales, both realistic and fantastic. ==Bronze Age==