Romanticism [1831 - 1849]
The first part of the Golden Age was dominated by Romanticism. Historians usually point out to 1831 as marking the commencement of the Golden Age, a year in which great works of Russian poetry and fiction were finished and released. Firstly, Alexander Griboyedov’s Woe from Wit, a satiric comedy in verse about Moscow society after Napoleon, was performed for the first time in January. Some months later Moscow-born Aleksandr Pushkin, deemed Russia’a greatest poet, would finish writing Eugene Onegin, his classic novel in verse, which he started in 1823 and would be officially published in 1833. Finally, that same year Nikolai Gogol (who lived in what is now Ukraine until the age of 19) started publishing Evenings on a Farm Near the Dikanka, a series of short stories related to peasant life. The stories were first published separately in magazines, and later in book form, when Gogol was only 22 years old.
Gogol and Pushkin met around this time, and this relationship would prove to be a large source of mutual literary influence. Gogol in fact attributed to Pushkin the inspiration for his play The Government Inspector and his comic novel Dead Souls, published in 1836 and 1842, respectively, and which satirize the political corruption present in Imperial Russia. These two subversive works would eventually lead him to exile. Further, Pushkin’s work also went on to inspire Mikhail Lermontov, whose literary career was indeed launched by the fame he gained after publishing “Death of a Poet”, a poem about Pushkin’s death in 1837 in a duel against the man who was allegedly having an affair with his wife. Lermontov was considered the most important Russian poet after Pushkin’s death, and was also author to a series of short stories under the title A Hero of Our Time. Lermontov had a brief literary career due to his premature death, also in a duel, and much of his work was posthumously published due to censoring.
The end of the Romantic period of the Golden Age was partly marked by the controversy generated by Nikolai Gogol’s 1847 publication of Selected Passages from My Correspondence with Friends, where he exposed his conservative religious beliefs. His endorsement of serfdom, autocracy and the Orthodox Church was met with dire opposition by many critics. Vissarion Belinsky, an influential literary critic of the time, wrote a harsh letter to Gogol referring to his recent publication as morally pernicious, as it represented an expression against human dignity. Belinsky’s letter (which among other things supported the abolition of serfdom) went on to have unexpected influence on the Russian intellectual community of the time: not only did it contribute to the end of Gogol’s literary career, but it was also widely distributed by a secret press and publicly read by Fyodor Dostoevsky on repeated occasions, which caused him a death sentence that turned out to be transformed to his four years of imprisonment in Siberia.