Russian Poetry of the 19th Century

Many of the outstanding Russian poets of the 19th century – F.I. Tyutchev, A.A. Fet, N.A. Nekrasov, A.K. Tolstoy, A.N. Maikov – began their creative path in the late 1830s – early 1840s. It was not a very favorable time for poetry. After the death of A.S. Pushkin and M.Y. Lermontov, as V.G. Belinsky wrote, it is difficult to be not only remarkable but any kind of poet. Another important factor was that prose seized the minds of readers, and magazine editors, responding to the trends of the era, allocated pages to stories and novels, almost not publishing lyrical poems. Although the poets of the second half of the 19th century could not fully overcome the readers' indifference to lyric poetry and make them eagerly await their collections as they did, for example, the new novels of I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov, F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy, they made their poems sing. By the 1860s, Fet's romances were sung by almost all of Russia. The remarkable musicality of the works of Russian lyricists attracted the attention of outstanding composers: P.I. Tchaikovsky, N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, M.P. Mussorgsky, S.I. Taneyev, S.V. Rachmaninoff, who created musical masterpieces that were remembered and loved by the Russian people.