The two novelists now unquestionably classed as the greatest of their age, Tolstoy (q.v.) and Dostoyevsky (q.v.), produced their chief work between 1864 and 1880. Both are somewhat un representative of their time in that their interest was in the per manent entities of the soul rather than in current social problems.
Dostoyevsky was moreover unlike his contemporaries in the dra matic power and sense of tragedy revealed in his great novels. But Tolstoy's War and Peace may be regarded as the fulfilment of an ideal common to all the Russian realists : a form of fiction freed from artificial trammels, and adequate to the vast move ments of life itself.
The '60s and '70s.—Tolstoy and especially Dostoyevsky were at first underestimated. The limelight between 1863 and 188o was occupied by novelists of less genius, but greater conformity with definite parties. The bulk of this party-fiction is valueless. But Michael Saltykov (pseud. N. Shchedrin, 1826-89) stands out on the Radical side as a figure of greater importance. The humour of his satirical sketches, at one time immensely popular, has worn out, but his novel The Golovlev Family (1876) is a powerful picture of the brutishness of the provincial gentry, a social novel equal in significance to Oblomov. The Radical gen eration of the '6os produced a whole galaxy of young men of humble birth and great promise, who succumbed to adverse cir cumstances and failed to do all they might have done. They include the stern and unsentimental realists, Nicolas Pomyalovsky (1835-1863) and Theodore Reshetnikov (1841-1871) ; the lyrical humorist Alexander Levitov ; Gleb Uspensky (184o 1902), a conscience-stricken intellectual obsessed by a complex of social guilt ; the unsuccessful revolutionary Andrew Novod vorsky (1853-82) ; and the Siberian Nicolas Kushchevsky (1847 76), whose only novel Nicolas Negorev (1871) gives him a unique place among the minor novelists so great are its qualities of character-drawing, of humour and of pathos.
The only man of the generation who achieved what he was in tended to achieve, and has ultimately been recognized as a classic is Nicolas Leskov (1831-95). He failed to fit into the party divisions of the time and in consequence remained an outcast till the end of his life. His best work includes Cathedral Folk (1872, Eng. trans.), a humorous chronicle of provincial life; stories from the lives of the saints (after 1890) ; and a great num ber of short stories of Russian life. His rapid and packed nar rative; his Russian, full of Rabelaisian resource and inventive ness ; and his sharply drawn characters of strong men, saints and cranks, with their inextricable mixture of the heroic and the comi cal, stand in striking contrast to the usual methods of his con temporaries.
The drama followed the lead of the novel. The leading drama tists sought to reduce the element of plot and "artificiality" and to break away from the French school of Scribe. This is already apparent in the dramatic work (1847-52) of Turgenev, which sometimes anticipates the manner of Chekhov. The greatest dramatist of the realistic age, Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-86) (q.v.), also avoided all the artificialities of plot and effect, but created a new type of stagecraft, based on characters, which pro vided admirable "parts" for more than one generation of actors. A more dynamic type of play was cultivated by Alexander Suk hovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) whose three comedies (1855 seq.) are masterpieces of dramatic construction and savage satire. Pisemsky was also a more "dramatic" dramatist; his "popular tragedy" A Hard Lot (1858) remains the greatest realistic tragedy of the Russian repertory. Another type of play cultivated in the '6os and '70s was the historical play in blank verse. It produced nothing of first rate importance, but Tsar Theodore (1868) by Count Alexis Tolstoy (1817-1875) possesses merits that have made it deservedly popular on the stage.
The poets of the period were obsessed by the necessity of finding a compromise between the rights of the imagination and the de mands of modern life. The more notable of these eclectics were Apollon Maykov (1821-97) ; Yakov Polonsky (1819-98), who had a genuine gift of romantic song; and Count Alexis Tolstoy, who is perhaps best remembered under his own name as well as in the invented character of Kosma Prutkov, as the greatest Russian nonsense poet. Other poets, like Ivan Nikitin (1824-61), cultivated a more realistic type of poetry. The greatest of the poetic realists was Nicolas Nekrasov (1821-77). He was a Radical and for many years the editor of a leading review. His work in cludes biting satire, poignant personal elegies, poems on the suffer ings of the peasant, and narrative poems (The Pedlars, 1863; Who can be happy in Russia, 1873-76, Eng. trans. 1917), in which alone of all Russian poets he created poetry, truly collective and popular in spirit. The poetry of Afanasi Fet (182o-92) stands at the opposite extreme. His early lyrics are as incorporeal and ethereal as Verlaine's, while in those of his last years he attained a degree of concentration reminiscent of Chinese poetry. The generation born after 1830 was singularly poor in poetic talent. The only exceptions were Constantine Sluchevsky a metaphysical poet of great originality and real profundity, badly handicapped by the low poetic culture of his age; and the philosopher Vladimir Soloviev (see p. 756) whose lyrics are a record of his mystical experience.