This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

This chapter explores the unique formal features of the Russian novel from its tentative beginnings in the eighteenth century, through its rise in the 1840s, to its full flowering in the second half of the nineteenth century. The founders of the tradition broke with western models, setting a precedent for pushing generic boundaries. This involved experimentation with formal features (novel-in-verse, mixing history and essays with fictional narration, withholding narrative closure, etc.) and an expansion of the subject matter that novels were expected to contain. Given tight censorship, novels and literary criticism became a crucial space for engaging with the most pressing questions of the day. The form was made to accommodate ideological debates about social, political, scientific, and aesthetic issues far beyond the scope of most European novels. The Russian novel became rightfully famous for the depth of its psychological probing and the breadth of the existential questions it addresses.