Russian Literature in the Nineteenth Century

Chekhov's innovations as a short story writer appeared on the Russian literary scene during a period of transition from what is termed the "golden age" of Russian literature to the "silver age." The predominant literary style in Russia, beginning in the 1840s, was that of realism. Because the government exercised strict censorship over political expression, fiction writers took on the burden of expressing political views through their stories. Nikolai Gogol, an early master of the Russian short story, combined realism with elements of the fantastic in his widely influential story, "The Overcoat." Masters of the Russian realist novel include Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, 1862), Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment in 1866 and The Brothers Karamazov in 1879-1880), and Tolstoy (War & Peace in 1865-1869, Anna Karenina in 1875-1877, and the novella The Death of Ivan Ilych in 1886). In the 1880s, however, the predominance of the realist...