SOURCE: Kagan-Kans, Eva. “The Russian Short Story, 1850-1880.” In The Russian Short Story: A Critical History, edited by Charles A. Moser, pp. 50-102. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

In the following essay, Kagan-Kans provides an overview of the development of Russian realism during the period from 1850 to 1880, focusing on the short fiction of Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Fedor Dostoevsky, among others.

An Overview

The critic and man of letters Pavel Annenkov, who spoke of the 1840s as the “remarkable decade,” regarded the 1850s as a time of intellectual torpor. The first half of the decade corresponded with the last years of Nicholas I's reign, a time of extreme reaction and literary censorship. Nevertheless, for the history of Russian literature the decade is important because at that time certain artistic methods, with links to changes in the country's social and political life, came to the fore.

The literature of the 1850s...