Russian philology
Prose was flourishing as well. The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol. Then came
Ivan Turgenev, who mastered both short stories and novels. Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky soon became internationally renowned. 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, Osip Mandelstam, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marina
Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak. This era produced some first-rate novelists and short-story
writers, such as Aleksandr Kuprin, Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin, Leonid Andreyev, Fyodor
Sologub, Aleksey Remizov, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bely.
After the Revolution of 1917, Russian literature split into Soviet and white émigré parts.