Realism [1849 - 1899]
The second part of the Golden Age was characterized by works that centered on Realism. Born and raised in a lower class district on the edges of Moscow, in 1846 Fyodor Dostoyevsky published his first novella, Poor Folk, a sentimentalist epistolary presenting the friendship between a clerk and copyist and his second cousin, both of whom live in very poor conditions. Belinsky deemed Poor Folk Russia’s first “social novel”, while others remarked that the novel contained elements of satire and parody. After this critical success, other novels by Dostoyevsky were poorly received, including The Double (1846). It was not until after his return from Siberian exile, now based in Saint Petersburg, that he found new critical acclaim with his Notes from the House of the Dead, where he recounts his memoirs from his harsh years in the prison camps. More success would come with the publication of his novels Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment, published in 1864 and 1866, respectively, and most notably with Brothers Karamazov, in 1880.
In 1852, the same year as Gogol’s death, Leo Tolstoy published Childhood, his first work, under the initials L.N. in a journal founded by Pushkin. Writers like Ivan Turgenev –another great exponent of Russian Realism- and Dostoyevsky himself gave great praise to Childhood, and strived to find out the identity of the author. Along with Dostoyevsky, the work of Tolstoy, most notably War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) went on to dominate the Russian literary circles with their realist portrayal of the Russian society and the sociopolitical issues being debated at the time, from peasantry to education reform.
The mid 1880s witnessed the publication of Anton Chekhov’s first plays and short stories, rising to great popularity by the 1890s, and whose style had a large influence in the 20th century.
