ABSTRACT
Russia has never been truly free—the evolution of its social thought and publishing was always held back by the constraint of fierce censorship. Two great Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, each in his own way expressively represents the archetype of the Russian writer proper. In a Russia seized by the thirst for changes, every spiritual movement was perceived as a version of a liberating, revolutionary movement. Most nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Russian writers were far from supporters of revolution, but public opinion nonetheless subsumed their work into a revolutionary context. The Communists, who came to power in 1917, understood very well literature's principal importance as a social institution, and they used the traditionally eminent authority of literature in Russian society to accomplish their own ends. The last "heroic" period in the history of Russian literature ended in January 1992, when the former "Soviet people" woke up one day in a different country.
