I want to forget my beautiful:
Macha, I must avoid you.
To love I am rebellious,
Preferring my freedom.
(…)
Knowing my misfortune,
Have pity on me, Masha,
Yes, my pain is unusual,
Because I am your prisoner. [1]
From classicism to romanticism
Author of solemn odes, Gavril Derjavine embodies the figure of classicism at the end of the 18th century. However, he tends towards a more sentimental writing, which we like to describe as pre-romantic, at the end of his literary career. This momentum focused on the exaltation of feelings soon led to so-called sentimentalist authors of which Nikolai Karamzin is recognized as the instigator. Favorable to the reform of the language, Karamzin affirms his detachment from the classical codes in Russian literature. The sentimentalist movement quickly led to a current well known in Europe and which experienced its golden age between the years 1810 and 1840:it is about romanticism. This movement, born in England, reached its peak in Russia with the poet and prose writer Alexander Pushkin, who proudly affirmed his freedom as a writer. He thus merges fiction and history, addresses themes such as power and freedom despite constant censorship, and imperceptibly becomes the creator of modern prose.
But if Pushkin enjoyed success and notoriety through his romantic works, he also went beyond this literary current to gradually turn to more realistic writings.
A good fairy, in our tales, sometimes appears in the guise of a pike who chooses to pamper him a gentle and harmless man, in other words a sloth persecuted by everyone, the height of benefits without any reason.
[2]
The natural school
The natural school marks the first great period of prose in Russia, driven by truly committed authors such as Turgenev, Nekrassov and the illustrious Dostoyevsky. Occurring in the 1840s, this militant movement took over romantic literature and set itself the objective of “showing reality as it is”. As for Stendhal in France, the novel is a mirror which (under realistic influence) rather reflects the quirks of the world than its idealized side. Nicolaï Gogol, in this case, begins to tell the a priori uninteresting life of civil servants in his fantastic short story The Coat (1843), while Goncharov undertakes to narrate the evolution of Russia and notably stages a character who has remained famous for his discrepancy, or rather his inadequacy as the last romantic in a society that is no longer such:he is is about Oblomov. The eponymous novel, published in 1859, is the perfect representation of the concept of superfluous men, which arose between the years 1855 and 1865. Thus were nicknamed those who philosophized and dreamed rather than making themselves useful by working concretely.
We cannot live like this. This is why we must think seriously and see things in their true light, instead of crying like a child and shouting that God will not allow it. What will happen, I ask you, if tomorrow you are taken to the hospital? The other is mad and consumptive, she will soon die; and the children? Will Poletchka not be lost? Haven't you seen children here that their mothers send out to beg? I learned where these mothers live and how! In these places, the children are not the same as the others. A seven-year-old boy is vicious and a thief there. And yet children are the image of the Saviour. [3]
The Golden Age of Russian Literature
It is in an exacerbated generational conflict that Turgenev, among others, inserts the language of the peasants into his works, and breaks down the borders which separate social classes. The new generation unites to protest against the fixed and outdated ideas of their fathers. Writers recount the clashes, notably in the novel Father and Son by Ivan Turgenev published in 1862. But the golden age of Russian literature was led mainly by two authors who made their names resonate beyond the borders of the country:the writings imbued with realism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky knew a real success in a Russia on the move. Tolstoy expresses the common between men in a universal dimension, he relates in particular the existential crisis and the new perspective of death as a passage. Dostoyevsky, the "fruit" of the natural school, highlights the misery of the world through figures relatively victims of society such as the prostitute who sells herself for her family and the assassin who kills to save her.
The world renown of these two authors has earned Russia the recognition of a literature of its own.
This secret matters to me alone, and my words cannot explain it. This new feeling has neither changed me, nor dazzled me, nor made me happy as I thought; just as with paternal love there was neither surprise nor delight; but this feeling has crept into my soul through suffering, now it is firmly implanted there, and whatever name I seek to give it is faith.
[4 ]