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Russian Romanticism: The Movement That Created Modern Russian Literature

Russian Romanticism was the literary and cultural movement that flourished in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century, producing the founding works of modern Russian literature and laying the groundwork for the great Russian novel of the later nineteenth century. Drawing on the European Romantic tradition — especially the German, English, and French — and adapting it to the distinctive realities of Russian life, the Russian Romantics produced some of the most original and most enduring works of the early nineteenth century.

This page offers a structured introduction to Russian Romanticism — its origins, its major figures, its characteristic themes, and its long influence.

The Origins of Russian Romanticism

Russian Romanticism emerged in the early decades of the nineteenth century, in the decades after the Napoleonic Wars and in the reign of Alexander I. Several factors contributed to the rise of the movement:

The European Romantic influence — the major works of European Romanticism were widely read in Russia, often in the original languages or in rapid translation. The German Romantics, especially the Schlegel brothers and the Jena circle, were especially influential; the English Romantics, especially Byron, were also widely read; the French Romantics (Hugo, Lamartine) were an important influence.
The post-Napoleonic moment — the defeat of Napoleon, in which Russia played a major role, gave the new Russian writers a sense of national identity and historical importance. The Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, the burning of Moscow, the long retreat, and the final victory at Leipzig and the entry into Paris were major historical events that shaped the Russian Romantic imagination.
The Decembrist movement — the failed Decembrist revolt of 1825, in which a group of young Russian officers attempted to overthrow the autocratic Tsar and establish a constitutional government, gave the new generation a powerful political vocabulary of betrayal, sacrifice, and heroic idealism. The Decembrist poets and their allies in the literary world — and the exiled Decembrists in Siberia — became central figures of the Russian Romantic imagination.
The new interest in Russian history and folk culture — the gathering of folk songs and folk tales, the study of Russian history, the development of a distinctly Russian literary language — all of these contributed to the rise of the new movement.

The Major Phases

Russian Romanticism is usually divided into two main phases:

The early period (1810s–1820s) — the writers who first gave Russian literature a major Romantic voice, including the sentimentalist and early Romantic prose tradition, the poetry of Zhukovsky, the early works of Pushkin, and the early works of the Decembrist poets.
The great period (1820s–1840s) — the writers who produced the supreme achievements of Russian Romanticism, including the mature Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the early Tyutchev, and the early Belinsky.

The Major Figures

The major Russian Romantic writers include:

Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852) — the father of Russian Romanticism, the author of the ballads “Lyudmila” (1808) and “Svetlana” (1813), translator of European Romantic poetry, and tutor to the future Tsar Alexander II. Zhukovsky helped introduce the European Romantic tradition to Russian letters and gave the new movement its first major voice.
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) — the founding figure of modern Russian literature, author of the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1825–33), the play Boris Godunov (1825), the great narrative poems (Ruslan and Lyudmila, The Bronze Horseman), the great lyric poetry, the great fairy tales, and the great short stories. Pushkin is the central figure of Russian Romanticism and one of the great writers in the history of world literature.
Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841) — the second great Russian Romantic poet, author of the narrative poem The Demon (1829, published 1856), the verse novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), and a large body of lyric poetry. Lermontov died in a duel at the age of twenty-seven, and his life, like that of the English Romantics, became part of the Romantic myth of the artist-hero.
Fyodor Tyutchev (1803–1873) — one of the great Russian lyric poets, author of some of the most enduring short poems in the Russian language. Tyutchev was a philosopher-poet whose work explored the deep nature of the universe, the limits of human understanding, and the strange play of cosmic forces in human life.
Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) — a transitional figure between Romanticism and the Russian Realist tradition, author of the great Petersburg tales (“The Overcoat,” “The Nose,” “Diary of a Madman”), the satirical epic Dead Souls (1842), the play The Government Inspector (1836), and the strange, dark, late works of his final years. Gogol’s work is a major contribution to both the Romantic and the realist traditions.
The Decembrist poets — Kondraty Ryleyev, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, and the other writers associated with the Decembrist movement. Many of the Decembrist poets were exiled to Siberia after the failed revolt of 1825, and their work in exile, often written in secret and smuggled out, became a central part of the Russian Romantic tradition.
Antony Pogorelsky (Aleksey Perovsky) (1787–1836) — the author of the first Russian vampire story, “The Laughing Girl” (1828), and of the important collection The Black Hen (1829), which was one of the founding works of Russian children’s literature.
Yevgeny Baratynsky (1800–1844), Afanasy Fet (1820–1892), Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–1877/78) — and many other important poets of the Russian Romantic tradition.

The Themes of Russian Romanticism

The major themes of Russian Romanticism include:

The Russian national character — the search for a distinctly Russian identity, expressed in the language, the folk traditions, the religious traditions, and the history of the Russian people.
The heroic individual — the Romantic hero, often based on the Byronic model, who stands against society and the universe itself. Lermontov’s Pechorin in A Hero of Our Time is the central example of this figure in Russian literature.
The folk and the popular — the new interest in Russian folk songs, folk tales, and popular culture, gathered by the ethnographers of the period and used by the Romantic writers.
The supernatural and the demonic — the Russian fascination with the demonic, the supernatural, the world of the spirits, expressed in the great works of Lermontov (The Demon), Gogol, and the later Russian tradition.
Nature and the Russian landscape — the vast Russian steppe, the deep Russian forests, the great Russian rivers, the long Russian winters, all became central subjects of the new poetry.
The political hero and the political martyr — the Decembrist movement, the Petrashevsky circle, the later revolutionary movements, all drew on the Romantic vocabulary of political idealism and sacrifice.
The excess of feeling — the Russian Romantic cultivation of intense feeling, of melancholy, of the “superfluous man” and the failed idealist, became a central part of the Russian literary tradition.

The Long Influence

Russian Romanticism has had a profound influence on the subsequent development of Russian literature and on world literature. The great Russian novel of the mid- and late nineteenth century — Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Goncharov — all drew, in important ways, on the Romantic tradition. The Russian Symbolist movement of the 1890s and early 1900s — Blok, Bely, Bryusov, Sologub — was a conscious revival of Romantic themes in a new key. The great Russian poetry of the twentieth century — Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Brodsky — is all, in different ways, indebted to the Russian Romantic tradition. The influence of Pushkin, Lermontov, and Gogol on the Russian literary tradition is, in many ways, comparable to the influence of Shakespeare on the English tradition.