Russian philology
writers such as Vissarion Belinsky and Alexander Herzen; playwrights such as Aleksandr
Griboyedov, Aleksandr Ostrovsky and the satirist Kozma Prutkov.
The 20th century (Silver age)
The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry. Well-known
poets of the period include: Alexander Blok, Sergei Yesenin, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin
Balmont, Mikhail Kuzmin, Igor Severyanin, Sasha Chorny, Nikolay Gumilyov, Maximilian
Voloshin, Innokenty Annensky, Zinaida Gippius. The poets most often associated with the
"Silver Age" are Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak.
While the Silver Age is considered to be the development of the 19th-century Russian
literature tradition, some avant-garde poets tried to overturn it: Velimir Khlebnikov, David
Burliuk, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
Though the Silver Age is famous mostly for its poetry, it produced some first-rate novelists