Problems of Modern Russian Literature: Modernism

Abstract

Russian modernism transformed literary representation during the period conventionally associated with the Silver Age and the early Soviet avant-garde. This article examines how Symbolism, Acmeism, and Futurism responded to a shared crisis of realism while developing sharply different models of language, subjectivity, artistic authority, and historical experience. Using a qualitative literary-historical method, the study compares representative works and manifestos by Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov alongside established scholarship on Russian modernism. The analysis identifies five interrelated problems: the instability of objective reality, the fragmentation of the modern subject, the autonomy and materiality of poetic language, the reconfiguration of the reader’s role, and the pressure of revolution, censorship, and exile on literary production. The findings show that Russian modernism was neither a single school nor a simple rejection of realism. It was a contested field in which metaphysical symbolism, disciplined poetic concreteness, and radical linguistic experimentation offered competing answers to modernity. The article concludes that the lasting importance of Russian modernism lies in its transformation of literature from a transparent representation of the world into an active method for constructing, testing, and disputing reality.