This chapter traces the evolution of a specific character type that began with Aleksandr Pushkin’s Tatiana Larina in Eugene Onegin. In the hands of future authors such as Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoevskii, Tatiana came to represent an ideal for the Russian woman based on soulfulness, fidelity, and self-sacrifice. Russian women writers, too, used Tatiana as a model for their heroines. With the rise of the ‘woman question’ in the 1860s, the Russian woman was redefined to reveal her new potentials in a shifting society, with Nikolai Chernyshevskii’s Vera Pavlovna as a new ideal. In the Soviet period, she was rethought yet again to respond to shifting political mandates, variously downplaying or emphasising her maternal, caregiving side. The faithful, all-enduring Tatiana took on a new form in Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem and continues to evolve in contemporary feminist writing.

This chapter provides an introduction to Russian literature in the Modernist and avant-garde period, stretching from about 1890 to 1930. This period was one of extraordinary experimentation in Russian literature and the chapter outlines the differences between the key movements that emerged and their leading practitioners, including Symbolism (Aleksandr Blok), Futurism (Vladimir Maiakovskii, Velimir Khlebnikov), and Acmeism (Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam). It highlights the inextricable links between literature and politics in this period, especially following the Revolution of 1917, which saw the Bolsheviks take power and establish the Soviet Union. While the early 1920s witnessed a genuine debate among writers about what the new Soviet literature would look like, this diversity vanished by the end of the decade as centralisation took hold. By the 1930s, Socialist Realism had become the only approved official aesthetic. The chapter concludes with remarks about the Modernists’ legacy within and beyond Russia.