Literature and ideas in Russia after the Crimean War: the ‘Plebeian’ writers

Abstract

Even within the magnificent ‘golden age’ of Russian culture, which spans roughly the period 1820 to 1880, the decade that follows the death of Nicholas I in 1855 and the end of the Crimean War in 1856 stands out by virtue of the abundance, richness and intensity of its art and publicism. All of Turgenev’s major novels, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Crime andPunishment, Tolstoy’s Sebastopol Tales, Youth, and The Cossacks, Ostrovsky’s Thunderstorm and other plays, Nekrasov’s The Peddlars, Red-nosed Frost and much other poetry, Saltykov-Shchedrin’s Provincial Sketches, the best work of Pisemsky, almost all of Chernyshevsky’s publicism, all of Dobroliubov’s, and much of Pisarev’s, were written and published in these years. A new school of painters, the peredvizhniki, established itself in 1863. The major journals, such as Sovremennik, Otechestvennye zapiski, Russkii vestnik, and Russkoe slovo, in which most works of literature and thought were in the first instance published, flourished and achieved a circulation which, though infinitesimal by modern standards, was nevertheless unprecedented. Artists and thinkers inspired, stimulated, provoked and responded to one another in a debate about social, political, moral, and ultimately religious and philosophical questions that was more animated and far-reaching than that conducted in any earlier period, with the possible exception of the 1840s.