The House of Tolstoy, or Tolstoi, is a family of Russian gentry that acceded to the high aristocracy of the Russian Empire. The name Tolstoy is itself derived from the Russian adjective "толстый". They are the descendants of Andrey Kharitonovich Tolstoy, who moved from Chernigov to Moscow and served under Vasily II of Moscow in the 15th century. The "wild Tolstoys", as they were known in the high society of Imperial Russia, have left a lasting legacy in Russian politics, military history, literature, and fine arts.
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 and Nobel Prize winners Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor Sologub, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Alexander Belyaev, Andrei Bely and Maxim Gorky.
Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev was a Russian philosopher, theologian, and Christian existentialist who emphasized the existential spiritual significance of human freedom and the human person. Alternative historical spellings of his surname in English include "Berdiaev" and "Berdiaeff", and of his given name "Nicolas" and "Nicholas". Russian paleontologist and Christian apologist Alexander V. Khramov attributes his ideas about an atemporal human fall to Berdyaev and Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy.
Aleksey Stepanovich Khomyakov was a Russian theologian, philosopher, poet and amateur artist. He co-founded the Slavophile movement along with Ivan Kireyevsky, and he became one of its most distinguished theoreticians. His son Nikolay Khomyakov was a speaker of the State Duma.
Konstantin Nikolayevich Leontiev, monastic name: Clement was a conservative tsarist and imperial monarchist Russian philosopher who advocated closer cultural ties between Russia and the East against what he believed to be the West's catastrophic egalitarian, utilitarian and revolutionary influences. He also advocated Russia's cultural and territorial expansion eastward to India, Tibet and China.
People's Artist of the Russian Federation, also sometimes translated as National Artist of the Russian Federation, is an honorary and the highest title awarded to citizens of the Russian Federation, all outstanding in the performing arts, whose merits are exceptional in the sphere of the development of the performing arts.
Sovremennik was a Russian literary, social and political magazine, published in Saint Petersburg in 1836–1866. It came out four times a year in 1836–1843 and once a month after that. The magazine published poetry, prose, critical, historical, ethnographic and other material.
The philosophers' ships or philosopher's steamers were steamships that transported intellectuals expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922.
Russian philosophy is a collective name for the philosophical heritage of Russian thinkers.
The Russian Religious Renaissance was a period from roughly 1880 -1950 which witnessed a great creative outpouring of Russian philosophy, theology and spirituality. The term is derived from the title of a 1963 book by Nicholas Zernov called, The Russian Religious Renaissance of the Twentieth Century. The renaissance began in the late nineteenth century but was unexpectedly driven out of Russia due to the violent upheavals of the Bolshevik Revolution and early atheistic Communist regimes. This dislocation led to the resettlement of many Russian intelligentsia in Europe and the West where the renaissance reached its full expression. Although often viewed as a development within the Russian Orthodox world, the spiritual ideals of the Russian Religious Renaissance were carried throughout the wider Eastern Orthodox Church and even into the Roman Catholic and Protestant communities.
Natalie Duddington was a philosopher and a translator of Russian literature into English. Her first name sometimes appears as Nathalie.
Russian Machism (//) was a term applied to a variety of political/philosophical viewpoints which emerged in Imperial Russia in the beginning of the twentieth century before the Russian Revolution. They shared an interest in the scientific and philosophical insights of Ernst Mach. Many, but not all, of the Russian Machists were Marxists, and some viewed Machism as an essential ingredient of a materialist outlook on the world. The term came into use around 1905, primarily as a polemical expression used by Lenin and Georgi Plekhanov. With a shared desire to defend an "orthodox" account of Marxism, from their own differing perspective they both divided the opponents of this putative orthodoxy into the "idealists" and the "Machists". The term remained a signifier of Marxist-Leninist opprobrium from the 1920s through into the 1970s. This was shown by Alexander Maximov's use of the term to criticize Boris Hessen in 1928. It can also be seen in Evald Ilyenkov's chapter on "Marxism against Machism as the Philosophy of Lifeless Reaction" in Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism (1979).
The leaders of the Russian Civil War listed below include the important political and military figures of the Russian Civil War. The conflict, fought largely from 7 November 1917 to 25 October 1922, was fought between numerous factions, the two largest being the Bolsheviks and the White Movement. While the Bolsheviks were centralized under the administration of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), led by Vladimir Lenin, along with their various satellite and buffer states, the White Movement was more decentralized, functioning as a loose confederation of anti-Bolshevik forces united only in opposition to their common enemy - though from September 1918 to April 1920, the White Armies were nominally united under the administration of the Russian State, when, for nearly two years, Admiral Alexander Kolchak served as the overall head of the White Movement and as the internationally recognized Head of State of Russia. In addition to the two primary factions, the war also involved a number of third parties, including the anarchists of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, and the non-ideological Green Armies.
