Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia, its émigrés, and to Russian-language literature. The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Early Middle Ages when Old Church Slavonic was introduced as a liturgical language and became used as a literary language. The native Russian vernacular remained the use within oral literature as well as written for decrees, laws, massages, chronicles, military tales, and so on. 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. The Romantic movement contributed to a flowering of literary talent: poet Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore. Mikhail Lermontov was one of the most important poets and novelists. Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev wrote masterful short stories and novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy became internationally renowned. Other important figures 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 end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century is sometimes called 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.
Ivan Yakovych Franko was a Ukrainian poet, writer, social and literary critic, journalist, translator, economist, political activist, doctor of philosophy, ethnographer, and the author of the first detective novels and modern poetry in the Ukrainian language.
Lina Vasylivna Kostenko is a Ukrainian poet, journalist, writer, publisher, and former Soviet dissident. A founder and leading representative of the Sixtiers poetry movement, Kostenko has been described as one of Ukraine's foremost poets and credited with reviving Ukrainian-language lyric poetry.
Vasyl Semenovych Stus was a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic, journalist, and an active member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. For his political convictions, his works were banned by the Soviet regime and he spent 13 years in detention until his death in Perm-36—then a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners, subsequently The Museum of the History of Political Repression—after having declared a hunger strike on September 4, 1985. On November 26, 2005, the Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko posthumously awarded him the highest national title: Hero of Ukraine. Stus is widely regarded as one of Ukraine's foremost poets.
Bohdan-Ihor Vasyliovych Antonych was a 20th-century Ukrainian poet. In 1934 Antonych received third prize honours from the Ivan Franko Society of Writers and Journalists for his work Three Signet Rings.
Anatoly Kudryavitsky is a Russian-Irish novelist, poet, editor and literary translator.
Pavlo Mykhailovych Hubenko, better known by the literary pseudonym of Ostap Vyshnia, was a Ukrainian writer, humourist, satirist, and medical official (feldsher). Nicknamed by critics as the Ukrainian Mark Twain and the Ukrainian Printing King; His fame was said to have competed in early Soviet Ukraine with only Taras Shevchenko and Vladimir Lenin.
Contemporary Ukrainian literature refers to Ukrainian literature since 1991, the year of both Ukrainian independence and the collapse of the Soviet Union. From that year on, censorship in the Soviet Union ceased to exist and writers were able to break openly with the official socialist realism style of art, music, and literature. Principal changes had taken place in Ukrainian literature already under Perestroika (1985) and especially after the Chernobyl disaster. Some researchers consider that modern Ukrainian literature was born during the 1970s and founded by Soviet dissidents from the sixties generation.
Vasyl Makhno is a Ukrainian poet, essayist, and translator. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Winter Letters and Other Poems, translated by Orest Popovych and, most recently, I want to be Jazz and Rock’n’Roll. He has also published two books of essays, The Gertrude Stein Memorial Cultural and Recreation Park (2006) and Horn of Plenty (2011). Makhno has translated Zbigniew Herbert’s and Janusz Szuber’s poetry from Polish into Ukrainian. His poems and essays have been translated into 25 languages, and he is the 2013 recipient of Serbia’s Povele Morave Prize in Poetry. Makhno currently lives in New York City.
Larissa Maria Lubov Zaleska Onyshkevych is a scholar of modern Ukrainian drama and literature. Most of her publications are on modern and postmodern Ukrainian drama, that she discusses in a comparative literature approach. Ukrainian poetry and prose, as well as issues of the Ukrainian language, are also topics of her interest.
SurVision is an international English-language surrealist poetry project, comprising an online magazine and a book-publishing outlet. SurVision magazine, founded in March 2017 by poet Anatoly Kudryavitsky, is a platform for surrealist poetry from Ireland and the world. SurVision Books, the book imprint, started up the following year.
Halyna Kruk is a Ukrainian writer, translator, educator and literary critic. Her surname also appears as Krouk.
Oleksandr Korotko is a Ukrainian poet, writer, essayist. Member of the Belgian PEN Club, Academician of the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Literature, member of the Writers' Union of Israel. The representative of the modern avant-garde trend in philosophical poetry.
Natalka Volodymyrivna Sniadanko is a Ukrainian writer, journalist, and translator. She won the Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski Literary Prize in 2011.
Marianna Kiyanovska is a Ukrainian poet, translator and a literary scholar and is a recipient of the Shevchenko National Prize (2020) and the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award (2022) for the poetry book The Voices of Babyn Yar. She is a member of the National Union of Writers of Ukraine and the Ukrainian PEN.
Lyuba Yakimchuk, also known as Lyubov Yakymchuk, is a Ukrainian poet, playwright, and screenwriter, living in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her work includes Apricots of Donbas (2015).
Iryna Shuvalova is a Ukrainian poet, translator and scholar.
Myroslav Laiuk is a Ukrainian writer.
Yuliya Musakovska is a Ukrainian poet and translator. She is the author of poetry collections such as “Exhaling, Inhaling” (2010), “Masks” (2011), “Hunting for Silence” (2014), “Men, Women and Children,” and “The God of Freedom” (2021) as well as two poetry chapbooks released in Poland and Sweden. Her poems have been translated into over thirty languages and widely published across the globe. A full length English translation of Musakovska's poetry, The God of Freedom, was published by Arrowsmith Press in 2024.
