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. While the Soviet Union assured universal literacy and a highly developed book printing industry, it also enforced ideological censorship. In the 1930s Socialist realism became the predominant trend in Russia. Its leading figure was Maxim Gorky, who laid the foundations of this style
Accordingly, Sukikh (1971:312) agrees that the progressive thinkers of the forties had lost their edge. This evaluation by the author himself sets a tone through which the connotation of the portrayal of the `generation of fathers' in Fathers and Sons can be assessed. By taking the title in the broader sense as indicating a generational, rather than a parental and filial relationship, the "generation of fathers" is represented by Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov and Yevgeny Vassilievich Bazarov. The `fathers' can be seen as the contemporaries of the "superfluous man" and romantic idealists, who had a carefully shaped taste of arts and sense in beauty. Vishnyakova (2011) puts it, "The "fathers" were reading the German idealists, admired French romanticism, unconditionally worshiped beauty, and strongly believed in a hierarchy of moral values that were not human conventions." Indeed, this characterisation is mainly brought forward by
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