Born: June 6, 1799 Died: February 10, 1837 Alexander Pushkin was born into a family of Russian nobility in Moscow, Russia. At the turn of the nineteenth century Moscow was home to Russia's first university, newspaper system, and museum. Moscow was known for its celebration of Russian intelligence and culture. After his formal education, Pushkin had a reckless life and wrote about 130 poems in the early writing years. Around 1820 Pushkin wrote one of his first major works, Ruslan and Ludmila. In 1824 he wrote Eugene Onegin in verse poetry and gained wide popularity.
Pushkin is normally credited with developing modern Russian literature as he introduced Russia to Western literature and European genres. He used lots of rhythmic and poetic devices in his writing, however after 1830 he focused more on short stories. Famous Pieces:
Ruslan and Ludmila
Eugene Onegin
The Captain's Daughter
Boris Godunov
Guy de Maupassant
Born: August 5,1850 Died: July 6, 1893 Guy de Maupassant was born to a French family strongly influenced by his mother and little by his father. France in the nineteenth century In his youth he greatly admired an older author named Flaubert and began writing at a young age. His writing was influenced by Flaubert and also by his own upbringing and poor relationships with his parents, as in his works he clearly portrays all men as pigs and women as saints. In the beginning of his career he worked as a journalist for newspapers. Maupassant is most famous for his short stories that vividly depict a French life at that time.
He also heavily and continuously focuses on the idea of men below women, vanity being a common downfall and the nobility of the poor. Many accredit Maupassant as being very influential in the formation of the modern short story. By the time of his death he had written 6 novels and 300 short stories. Famous Pieces:
Madame Bovary
The Necklace
Bel Amie
Mademoiselle Fifi
Leo Tolstoy
Born: September 9, 1828 Died: November 20, 1910 Leo Tolstoy was born in Tula Province, Russia . Tula in the nineteenth century was known for its museum showcasing weapons and heavily industrialization. After Leo left Kazan University, even without a diploma he became a farmer and started writing daily diary entries. Tolstoy had a troubled and monotonous life of drinking, fighting, sleeping, etc and in 1852 he started to write to turn his life around and wrote and sent an autobiographical story called Childhood to be published in a newspaper. After that Tolstoy continued to write an autobiography trilogy and other fictional novels.
His first, and most famous novel, War and Peace, was published in 1865, Tolstoy's novels almost always were about people he had really met. He used very vivid and descriptive words to create a picture of the story and very accurately copied the European lifestyle into his books. His life was very hectic as his popularity grew and that was expressed in some of his characters. Famous Pieces
War and Peace
Anna Karenina
What I Believe
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Anton Chekhov
Born: January 29, 1860 Died: July 15, 1904 Anton Chekhov was born in Taganrog, Russia in 1860. In this time Taganrog was a newly established governorate and heavily industrializing and modernizing into the nineteenth century. Chekhov and his family later moved to Moscow where they were very poor and Anton began his writing career. He wrote free lance pieces and drew sketches for a newspaper. To escape poor health he began writing a novella called The Steppe . When his brother Nikolai, who had been researching prisons in law study, died, Anton took over that obsession to reform them.
The death of his brother and desire to reform prisons influenced his writing. All of his short stories and plays had a distinct foreshadowing and tone of sadness right from the beginning. A hallmark of Chekhov's writing is that he rarely included basic information to the story in the form of introductions and conclusions, but used foreshadowing to connect missing pieces. Famous Pieces: