Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages, when epics and chronicles in Old East Slavic were composed. By the Age of Enlightenment, literature had grown in importance, and from the early 1830s, Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry, prose and drama. Romanticism permitted a flowering of poetic talent: Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Prose was flourishing as well. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy soon became internationally renowned. Other important figures of Russian realism were Ivan Goncharov, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin and Nikolai Leskov. In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist. The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. The poets most often associated with the "Silver Age" are Konstantin Balmont, Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolay Gumilyov, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Marina Tsvetaeva. This era produced some first-rate novelists and short-story writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.
Andrey Yuryevich Kurkov is a Ukrainian novelist and an independent thinker who writes in Russian. He is the author of 19 novels, including the bestselling Death and the Penguin, 9 books for children, and about 20 documentary, fiction and TV movie scripts. His work is currently translated into 37 languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Persian and Hebrew, and published in 65 countries. Kurkov, who has long been a respected commentator on Ukraine for the international media, notably in Europe and the United States, has written assorted articles for various publications worldwide. His books are full of black humour, post-Soviet reality and elements of surrealism.
The Soviet Union (USSR) competed at the 1976 Summer Olympics in the city of Montreal, Quebec, Canada. 410 competitors, 285 men and 125 women, took part in 189 events in 22 sports. As the country hosted the next Olympics in Moscow, a Soviet segment was performed at the closing ceremony.
Guðmundur Andri Thorsson is an editor, critic, and author born in Iceland on 31 December 1957. He received his degree in literature in 1983 from the University of Iceland. His first work was as a literary critic in the 1980s.
Magda Szabó was a Hungarian novelist. Doctor of philology, she also wrote dramas, essays, studies, memoirs, poetry and children's literature. She was a founding member of the Digital Literary Academy, an online digital repository of Hungarian literature. She is the most translated Hungarian author, with publications in 42 countries and over 30 languages.
Yurii Ihorovych Andrukhovych is a Ukrainian prose writer, poet, essayist, and translator.
Death and the Penguin is a novel by Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 1996 in Russian, it was translated and published in English in 2001. It is a bleak, satirical work with surreal elements and dark humour.
Marina Lewycka is a British novelist of Ukrainian origin.
The Door is a novel by Hungarian writer Magda Szabó. The Door was originally published in Hungary in 1987, and translated into English in 1995 by Stefan Draughon for American publication, and again in 2005 by Len Rix for British publication. Rix's translation won the 2006 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Rix's translation was republished in 2015 by New York Review Books Classics.
Two Caravans is a novel by Marina Lewycka. It was published by Penguin Books on 29 March 2007 for the United Kingdom market. In the United States and Canada it is published under the title Strawberry Fields. The story focuses on characters who are migrant labourers of various backgrounds working in England's agricultural industry, in particular, portraying Eastern Europeans in the United Kingdom. The book follows Lewycka's debut novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2008.
The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize is the United Kingdom's first literary award for comic literature. Established in 2000 and named in honour of P. G. Wodehouse, past winners include Paul Torday in 2007 with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen and Marina Lewycka with A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian 2005 and Jasper Fforde for The Well of Lost Plots in 2004. Gary Shteyngart was the first American winner in 2011.
Science fiction and fantasy have been part of mainstream Russian literature since the 19th century. Russian fantasy developed from the centuries-old traditions of Slavic mythology and folklore. Russian science fiction emerged in the mid-19th century and rose to its golden age during the Soviet era, both in cinema and literature, with writers like the Strugatsky brothers, Kir Bulychov, and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others. Soviet filmmakers, such as Andrei Tarkovsky, also produced many science fiction and fantasy films. With the fall of the Iron Curtain, modern Russia experienced a renaissance of fantasy. Outside modern Russian borders, there are a significant number of Russophone writers and filmmakers from Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, who have made a notable contribution to the genres.
Svitlana Pyrkalo is a London-based writer, journalist and translator who writes in Ukrainian, English and Russian. She graduated from the Kyiv National University, linguistics faculty, and currently lives and works in Whitechapel, East London, United Kingdom. She blogs about life in her borough on pyrkalo.com.
Penguin Lost is a novel by Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 2005 in Russian, it was translated and published in English in 2010. It is the sequel to the author's novel Death and the Penguin.
Dmitry Ivanovich Maevsky is a Soviet Russian painter, lived and worked in Leningrad, a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, regarded as one of the representatives of the Leningrad school of painting, most famous for his lyrical landscapes.
Nadezhda Pavlovna Shteinmiller was a Russian Soviet realist painter, graphic artist, art teacher, scenographer, and stage designer who lived and worked in Leningrad. She was a member of the Leningrad Union of Artists, regarded as one of the leading representatives of the Leningrad School of Painting.
A Matter of Life and Death is a novel by Andrey Kurkov. Originally published in 1996 in Russian, it was translated and published in English in 2005.
We Are All Made of Glue is English novelist Marina Lewycka's third novel, published in 2009. The book follows the friendship of Georgina, a recently separated middle-aged freelance journalist and Mrs Shapiro, an elderly lady who lives with seven cats in a dilapidated North London mansion.
Beslan: The Tragedy of School No 1 is a 2008 book written by Timothy "Tim" Phillips and published by Granta Books. It discusses the Beslan school siege of 2004.
