Russian literature as an ethical and political act

Since the beginning of the 19th century, Russian literature has been established as a space for political debates, in which through fictionalized narrative and literary criticism the national reality was discussed in its political, ideological and social aspects. It was a way of evading the tight political and ideological control of the Tsarist State at first, and later that of the Soviet State, turning the act of writing not only into a political act but also into an ethical act. In this essay the parallels of the development of Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries are drawn, revealing the similarities in their relationship with power, and the ways of resisting it. This allows us to assert that in some way Soviet Russia turned out to be the transformation of the Tsarist Russia, in which the Bolshevik Revolution produced only a momentary gap of a few years, during which the relationship between the writers and power changed radically.