Русская литература

Russian Literature

C1 · Advanced · non-fiction · 10 scenes · Premium story

An advanced documentary reader on Russian literature. One of the youngest of Europe's great literatures: almost nothing secular before the eighteenth century, then Pushkin builds the modern literary language and is dead in a duel at thirty-seven. Explains the thing most surveys skip — that the novels argue so much because censorship left nowhere else to argue, and the thick monthly journals serialised the result to readers who waited for the next issue. Ends with what survived the twentieth century, and by what means.

Read Русская литература in Russian

Characters

Alexander Pushkin (Александр Пушкин) — The founder
Nikolai Gogol (Николай Гоголь) — The satirist
Fyodor Dostoevsky (Фёдор Достоевский) — The novelist of conscience
Anton Chekhov (Антон Чехов) — Doctor and writer
Anna Akhmatova (Анна Ахматова) — The poet who used memory as paper

Vocabulary from this story

литература — literature
писатель — writer
поэт — poet
роман — novel
повесть — novella
рассказ — short story
стихи — verse
читатель — reader
век — century
образец — model
перевод — translation
дуэль — duel