Contribution to the world literature

Russia’s output of great literature over two centuries is nothing short of miraculous. Having endured tyranny under their czarist regime, as well as great suffering during two world wars and under Josef Stalin, it seems unlikely that they would have time for sure monumental, soul-searching novels. But the Russian literary tradition rivals most if not all countries, and its consistent ambition to define (and even redefine) social conditions has kept even it’s oldest works relevant in the public sphere. Here are only a few of the greatest novels in Mother Russia’s storied history.

1. Mikhail Lermontov – A hero of our Time (1840)

Previously to Lermontov’s groundbreaking novel, Russian literature had been populated by short prose works and dominated by the poetry of Eugene Pushkin. But once Lermontov introduced his character Pechorin, he would go on to set a benchmark for the complexity of characters in Russian fiction. A flawed, non-Romantic figure who must live up to ideals he can’t uphold, Lermontov proclaimed the end of the Romantic era and ushered the great era of realist fiction.

2. Nikolay Gogol – Dead Souls (1842)

Gogol’s novel about a man who tries to trick landowners into buying their dead serfs (“dead souls”), who are technically still alive until the next Russian census, is a satirical picaresque similar in style to Cervantes but which stands alone for its odd and grotesque caricatures of Russian provincial life. Although Gogol was a self-professed conservative, the younger generations used it to argue against the ills of 19th century Russian society.

3. Ivan Goncharov – Oblomov (1859)

Goncharov tied together the social and personal issues of the day with this novel about a member of the gentry grown who is caught between the “idyllic” life of pre-emancipation serfdom and the “new”, more liberated Russia. Combining the romance of Pushkin and the rising school of realism, Oblomov is one of the best records of Russia’s great societal transition.

4. Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons (1862)

Fathers and Sons did what many other Russian novels did: pit the younger generation against the old. When Bazarov, a strict nihilist, challenges the well-established mores of Provincial life, he lures the naive towards his radical ideas. But when his beliefs get challenged by the unexpected appearance of passionate love and spirituality, he suffers a crisis that will force him to rethink his entire worldview.

5. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment (1867)

The first of Dostoevsky’s major novels, this presumably simple tale about a murder and its aftermath has remained one of the great preservers of 19th century urban life in Russia, describing everything from poverty, religion, family and of course, evil. When Raskolnikov, a former student enamored by Napoleonic ideals of superiority, decides to commit a murder against a old pawnbroker, it provokes one of the greatest personal transformations ever portrayed in literature.

6. Lev Tolstoy – War and Peace (1863-1869)

The Great White Whale of Russian literature, War and Peace is a 1,300 page work that includes hundreds of subplots and characters all intertwining during the failed Napoleonic invasions of 1812. It has been criticized for its narrative looseness, but the transition from innocence to experience of its 5 main characters beautifully details the personal and historical happenings of early 19th century Russia.

7. Mikhail Sholokhov – Quiet Flows the Don (1928-1940)

While War and Peace was influenced in part by the glories and ironies of war, Sholokhov decided to forgo any elevation of battle and depict in all of its brutality and sorrow the decline of the Cossack civilization in this four-novel series. The novel was at first controversial for its antagonizing of the Bolshevik invaders during the revolutionary war, but Sholokhov’s emphasis on Cossack life and cosmology is as humanizing as it is painfully elegiac.

8. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita (1966)

The Master and Margarita was like nothing written before it. Published posthumously more than two decades after the death of the author, this bizarre but fantastical twist of Goethe’s Faust tells the story of a figure named Woland–presumably the devil–who wreaks havoc on Soviet Moscow. Hilarious, fantastical and ridiculous, Bulgakov’s novel is still celebrated today in Russia, and is considered by some to be the founding text of magic realism.

ST CENTURY

The end of the twentieth century century has proven a difficult period for Russian literature, with relatively few distinct voices. Among the most discussed authors of these period were novelists Victor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin and a poet Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov.

A relatively new trend in Russian literature is that female novelists such as Tatyana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and Dina Rubina came into prominence.

Detective stories and thrillers have proven a very successful genre of new Russian literature: In the 1990s, serial detective novels by Alexandra Marinina, Polina Dashkova, and Darya Dontsova were published in millions of copies. In the next decade a more "high-brow" detective fiction by author Boris Akunin, with his series about the nineteenth century sleuth Erast Fandorin, became widely popular.

The tradition of classic Russian novel continues with such authors as Mikhail Shishkin.

The leading poets of young generation are arguably Dmitry Vodennikov and Andrey Rodionov, both famous not only for their verses, but also for ability to artistically recite them.

In the 21st century, a new generation of Russian authors appeared differing greatly from the postmodernist Russian prose of the late 20th century, which lead critics to speak about “new realism”. Having grown up after the fall of the Soviet Union, the "new realists" write about every day life, but without using the mystical and surrealist elements of their predecessors.

The "new realists" are writers who assume there is a place for preaching in journalism, social and political writing and the media, but that “direct action” is the responsibility of civil society.

Leading "new realists" include Ilja Stogoff, Zakhar Prilepin, Alexander Karasyov, Arkadi Babchenko, Vladimir Lorchenkov, Alexander Snegiryov and the political author Sergej Shargunov.

ПРИЛОЖЕНИЕ 3.1.