Silver Age
The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Well-known poets of the period include: Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Mikhail Kuzmin, Igor Severyanin, Sasha Chorny, Nikolay Gumilyov, Maximilian Voloshin, Innokenty Annensky, Zinaida Gippius. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak.
Though the Silver Age is famous mostly for its poetry, it produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev,Fedor Sologub, Aleksey Remizov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bely, though most of them wrote poetry as well as prose.
20Th century
In the 1930s Socialist realism became the predominant trend in Russia. Its leading figure was Maxim Gorky, who laid the foundations of this style. Gorky considered the main task of writers to help in the development of the new man in socialist society. Gorky's works were significant for the development of literature in Russia and became influential in many parts of the world.[14]
Nikolay Ostrovsky's novel How the Steel Was Tempered has been among the most successful works of Russian literature, 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.[15] In Russia, more than 35 million copies of the book are in circulation. This novel has served as an inspiration to youths around the world and played a mobilizing role in Russia's Great Patriotic War.[17]
Some 1930s writers, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita, and Nobel-prize winning Boris Pasternak with his novel Doctor Zhivago continued the classical tradition of Russian literature with little or no hope of being published. Their major works would not be published until the Khrushchev Thaw, and Pasternak was forced to refuse his Nobel prize.
The Khrushchev Thaw brought some fresh wind to literature. Poetry became a mass cultural phenomenon: Bella Akhmadulina, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Andrei Voznesensky, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, read their poems in stadiums and attracted huge crowds.
Some writers dared to oppose Soviet ideology, like short story writer Varlam Shalamov and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote about life in the gulag camps.
Popular genres
Children's literature in Soviet Union was considered a major genre, because of its educational role. A large share of early period children's books were poems: Korney Chukovsky, Samuil Marshak,Agnia Barto were among the most read. "Adult" poets, such as Mayakovsky and Sergey Mikhalkov, contributed to the genre as well. Mystery was another popular genre. Detectives by brothers Arkady and Georgy Vayner and spy novels by Yulian Semyonov were best-selling,[20] and many of them were adapted into film or TV in 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.[21]
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. The late Soviet historical fiction was dominated by World War II novels and short stories by authors such as Boris Vasilyev, Viktor Astafyev, Boris Polevoy, Vasil Bykaŭ, among many others, based on the authors' own war experience.