Literature and the Russian revolutions

[promethean]

What were the kinds of literature and authors who were popular during both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions in Russia?

[ComradeOm]

Honestly, I don't know. Theatre was popular, and cinema increasingly so, but I'm not sure about popular literature. Obviously Russia has a tremendous literary tradition - and this carried through to the revolutions with the likes of Gorky, Babel and Mayakovsky - but I couldn't say to what degree this had filtered down to the realm of popular culture. Particularly so when large swathes of the population, urban and rural, were still illiterate. I can give you the names of some studies on Russian literature in the period but most tend to focus on what the intelligentsia was reading, as opposed to the workers. (The peasants probably weren't reading anything.)

One thing that I can say is that almost immediately after 1917 there was a publishing boom in memoirs dealing with the revolutions. Sometimes it seems that almost everyone involved in these events, from politicians to soldiers to workers, published their thoughts and experiences. Unfortunately only a tiny fraction of this horde has been published in English. Rather more common are the semi-autobiographical fictional novels/stories that proved a mainstay of Soviet publishing for the next few decades. Some of these are excellent: Babel's Red Cavalry springs to mind

[Volcanicity]

Other writer's that were well known at the time were the poet and essayist Osip Mandelstam and the Poets Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok though like ComradeOm said aboveI don't how popular they were away from the intelligentsia.
From what I've read as in Britain at that time periodical magazines were read more by people of differing ages and education.Here is some info on one of the most popular http://wikipedia.org/wiki/niva_(magazine).
They contained articles on Science,literature,art,they also had a section for children.Writers such as Tolstoy,Chekhov and Gorky also had their work serialised in them.

[Mr.Awesome]

Tolstoy was quite popular in that era. But he died in 1910.

[HalPhilipWalker]

Literature was a major part of the Russian underground political experience. In a land with severe state censorship, fictional literature was often a way to transmit social ideas and political theories under the noses of the state censors, whose approval was required before anything could be printed.

One major literary novel that had an enormous effect on revolutionaries was the novel What Is to Be Done by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. It was published while the author was locked up in the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, and was subsequently banned. Lenin read this book 5 times one summer, and borrowed the title (and many of the character's ideas) for his own political propaganda.

Other novels was Alexander Herzen's The Bell, Chernyshevsky's The Contemporary, and Maxim Gorky's Mother. The latter of these served as the template for the social novel when it was revived under the Soviet Union's official style of Socialist Realism.

[RED DAVE]

The Bell was a magazine, not a novel.

RED DAVE

[Jose Gracchus]

What were the kinds of literature and authors who were popular during both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions in Russia?

Not quite the best answer to your question, but Simon Pirani in The Russian Revolution in Retreat notes that Edward Bellamy's rather authoritarian, statist utopian socialist work, Looking Backward, was extremely popular with the "civil war communists" during 1918-1920.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Kautsky's The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution and The Road to Power were must-reads by Bolsheviks, pro-RSDLP Mensheviks, and later Menshevik-Internationalists.

[CornetJoyce]

Marshak's translation of Burns (1913, I think) rivaled Pushkin himself in popularity.
Burns was so well known in Russia that the Russian government issued a Burns commemorative stamp before Britain.

[Jose Gracchus]

Kautsky's The Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution and The Road to Power were must-reads by Bolsheviks, pro-RSDLP Mensheviks, and later Menshevik-Internationalists.

Relatively few Bolsheviks actually read even Das Kapital, much less Kautsky's derivative tomes. Do you have any evidence these were widely read among the party mass, as opposed to his pamphlets?

[Die Neue Zeit]

The first work definitely appeared in Die Neue Zeit as an article or a series of articles. Maybe the latter, as well.

[RED DAVE]

Relatively few Bolsheviks actually read even Das Kapital, much less Kautsky's derivative tomes. Do you have any evidence these were widely read among the party mass, as opposed to his pamphlets?
The first work definitely appeared in Die Neue Zeit as an article or a series of articles. Maybe the latter, as well.Now that's what I call a mordant response. :D

RED DAVE