ROOPAL CHAUDHARY, 3rd year 31811133

Ques. Realism in the Russian Novel of the 19 th century.

Realism: Realism in literature, or literary realism, is a movement that began in the 19th century.
Literary realism depicts the objective, material reality of the present world. However, this objective
reality is based on subjective position and reality of different people. Realism rejects the focus of the
imagination lens that exits in romanticism. The better realist novelist like Turgenev acknowledges
that there are a lot of realities and he cannot depict all. Therefore, the realist novels implicitly make
the philosophical admission that is impossible to access the universal truth, which may be doesn’t
exist.

Realism in Russian Novels of the 19th century

 Realism in Russian generally accepted as the Golden Age of Russian Lit. It boosted the
revolutionary wave that was happening in the second half of 19th century Russia. There is a
depiction of socialist realism which depicts the forces which work towards realism. The
theory of novels [George Lukacs] talks about socialist realism as an important strand in
Russian Realism. The leading Russian realists began to be published in the late 1840s: the
novelists Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Count Leo Tolstoy; the
playwright Aleksandr Ostrovsky; the poet Nikolai Nekrasov; and the novelist and political
thinker Aleksandr Herzen. In Russian Realism, it was on the issue of serfdom that the 19 th
century novel focused on, for example Bazarov, however, represent a group in
contemporary society that at time of the novel’s appearance was still all
formative stage.