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For Russians, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, “Poetry is born from the torment of the soul.” Only a part of the multicultural, multilingual Soviet Union, Russia is still a vast land, bordered on the north and south by the Baltic and the Black Seas, on the west by the Carpathian Mountains, and on the east by the mighty Volga River. In the thousand-year history of Russian literature, no natural barrier has preserved the Russian people from the agony of invasion, and Russian poetry has become unbreakably forged to their historical suffering. -- Russian Poetry Criticism

Russian literature of the twentieth century began like the literature of the nineteenth century, with the dominance of poetry and under the influence of Western European writers, among them Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), August Strindberg (1849-1912), the French Symbolist poets, and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). There was, however, a distinct break with the commonality of issues and viewpoints characteristic of the nineteenth century. Instead of consensus, division prevailed among schools of poetry, whose positions were provocatively stated in literary manifestos, an entirely new phenomenon in Russian literature. -- Russian Literature Criticism