Literature: 1828 to 1972
1828 CE to 1971 CE
Subject
Related Events
Showing 10 events out of 326 total
Anton Chekhov, the major literary figure in the last decade of the nineteenth century, contributes in two genres: short story and drama.
Chekhov, a realist who examines not society as a whole but the foibles of individuals, produces a large volume of sometimes tragic, sometimes comic short stories and several outstanding plays, including The Cherry Orchard, a dramatic chronicling of the decay of a Russian aristocratic family.
The writers of this period share important qualities: great attention to realistic, detailed descriptions
of everyday Russian life; the lifting of the taboo on describing the vulgar, unsightiy side of life; and a satirical attitude toward mediocrity and routine.
Although varying widely in style, subject matter, and viewpoint, these writers stimulate government bureaucrats, nobles, and intellectuals to think about important social issues.
This period of literature, which becomes known as the Age of Realism, lasts from about mid-century to 1905.
The literature of the Age of Realism owes a great debt to three authors and to a literary
critic of the preceding half-century: Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, and Vissarion Belinsky.
These figures set a pattern for language, subject matter, and narrative techniques, which before 1830 had been very poorly developed.
The critic Belinsky becomes the patron saint of the radical intelligentsia throughout the century.
These publications reach a large portion of the intelligentsia.
Most of the materials of the major writers and critics of the period are featured in such journals, and published debates are common between journals of various viewpoints.
Much of the prose literature of the period contains sharply polemical messages, favoring either radical or reactionary positions concerning the problems of Russian society.
Ivan Turgenev is perhaps the most successful at integrating social concerns with true literary art.
His Hunter's Sketches and Fathers and Sons portrays Russia's problems with great realism and with enough artistry that these works survive as classics.
Many writers of the period do not aim for social commentary, but the realism of their portrayals nevertheless drew comment from radical critics.
Such writers include the novelist Ivan Goncharov, whose Oblomov is a very negative portrayal of the provincial gentry, and the dramatist Aleksandr Ostrovskii, whose plays uniformly condemn the bourgeoisie.
The greatest talents of the age, their realistic style transcends immediate social issues and explores universal issues such as morality and the nature of life itself.
Although Dostoevsky is sometimes drawn into polemical satire, both writers keep the main body of their work above the dominant social and political preoccupations of the 1860s and 1870s.
Tolstoy's War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov have endured as genuine classics because they draw the best from the Russian realistic heritage while focusing on broad human questions.
Although Tolstoy continues to write into the twentieth century, he rejects his earlier style and never again reaches the level of his greatest works.
The leading Finnish nationalist spokesman is Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806-81), who sees increasing the use of the Finnish language as a way for Finland to avoid assimilation by Russia.
Snellman stresses the importance of literature in fostering national consciousness; until the nineteenth century, however, there had been almost nothing published in Finnish except for religious works.
The publication in 1835 of the Kalevala, the Finnish folk epic, fills the void, and in the late twentieth century the Kalevala will continue to be the single most important work of Finnish literature.
Its author is a country doctor named Elias Lonnrot, who, while practicing medicine along Finland's eastern border, had compiled hundreds of folk ballads that he has woven together into an epic poem of nearly twenty-three thousand lines.
Romanticism exerts the strongest influence on the Polish national consciousness.
The artistic element of nineteenth-century European culture, the Romantic movement is a natural partner of political nationalism, for it echoes the nationalist sympathy for folk cultures and manifests a general air of disdain for the conservative political order of post-Napoleonic Europe.
Under this influence, Polish literature flourishes anew in the works of a school of nineteenth-century Romantic poets, led by Adam Mickiewicz.
Mickiewicz concentrates on patriotic themes and the glorious national past.
Frederic Chopin (1810-49), a leading composer of the century, also uses the tragic history of his nation as a major inspiration.
Nurtured by these influences, nationalism awakens first among the intelligentsia and certain segments of the nobility, then more gradually in the peasantry.
At the end of the process, a broader definition of nationhood has replaced the old class-based " gentry patriotism" of Poland.
English speakers welcome this year’s translation of the first modern Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, as The Betrothed.
Inspired by Walter Scott's Ivanhoe and first published in 1827 in three volumes t is possibly the most famous and widely read novel of the Italian language.
Noah Webster, championing the notion that the US possesses its own distinct language, publishes his two-volume “American Dictionary of the English Language” in 1828 at the age of seventy.
Webster’s dictionary, a culmination of such earlier publication efforts as his popular “blue-backed speller” and earlier series of dictionaries, sells only twenty-five hundred copies, though it will eventually secure an honored place in the history of American English.