This chapter outlines the history of Russian Realism against a European backdrop. In the Russian Empire, as in Europe, there were no influential aesthetic manifestos predating the rise of Realist literature. Although the first seeds of the movement can be seen in the work of Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, and the critic Vissarion Belinskii, this chapter considers the dominant period of Russian Realism to be the period from 1845 to the 1880s. The Natural School foregrounded the genre of the physiological sketch and produced the first Realist novels by Fedor Dostoevskii, Aleksandr Herzen, and Ivan Goncharov. The ‘High’ Realism of the 1850s−80s featured a proliferation of the novel as a genre and thematic preoccupations with the role of gentry, the peasant question, political radicalism, the ‘woman question’, and bureaucracy.

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.

This chapter examines the history of the Russian novel after 1900 as a cyclical reworking or recycling of two traditions stretching back to the nineteenth century. The first, harmonious tradition is associated with Aleksandr Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, and Lev Tolstoi, while the second, disharmonious one follows the examples of Nikolai Gogol, Nikolai Leskov, and Fedor Dostoevskii. The Modernist novel inherited the second trend in the early twentieth century, while the Socialist Realist novel tried to inherit the first one thereafter. The post-Stalinist critical novel combined both trends, and more recently the Postmodernist novel has thrived on a programmatic break from national traditions. In turn, this liberation has coincided with the end of literocentrism in Russia, as the novel has ceased to be the repository and domain of national identity, and instead become an arena for play, fantasy, imagination, modelling, and learning – a space of freedom.