This chapter outlines the role of empire in shaping Russian literature from the mid-seventeenth century onwards. It traces the persistent literary impact of empire using the concept of imperiality, developed by analogy with coloniality, which decolonial theory describes as a sociopolitical and cognitive framework that endures beyond the times of colonialism. The chapter highlights the impact of empire on eighteenth-century Neoclassical poetry and on literature of the Romantic era. It then explores the enduring presence of empire in later periods, including Realist and early Modernist writing, as Russia’s colonial practices combined with a self-image as a magnificent and much-put-upon nation state. Finally, it presents the Soviet-era cultural system of the ‘friendship of the peoples’ as a reimagined imperiality and concludes with an in-depth discussion of critical reflections on imperial legacies by post-Soviet authors such as Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, and Liudmila Ulitskaia.

The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 proclaimed its goal as the creation of ‘new people’: the transformation of human bodies and minds to correspond to the transformation of society. Literature became a space in which this new model of human life could be explored. This chapter traces the genealogy of the ‘new person’ from the nineteenth century to the figure of the ideal worker in Socialist Realist texts of the 1930s and beyond. The temporal focus of the chapter lies in the decade following 1917, when urgent but often contradictory political imperatives shaped the new person in literary texts. The chapter focusses on three key tensions: the relationship between the individual and collective; competing ideals of spontaneous energy and iron discipline; and the ideal of the transformation of body and mind. It shows how texts explore the relationship between abstract ideals of humanness and their lived reality.

The figure of the madman has been invoked in Russian literature from the medieval period to the present day. This chapter investigates the evolution of that tradition with an emphasis on the period from Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953 to the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. It identifies four strains of literary madness: the divine madman, exemplified by the holy fool who tests society’s virtue and speaks truth to power; the creative madman, whose irrational behaviour stems from poetic inspiration and the generative power of the word; the rational madman, who follows a logical system to pathological extremes or inverts that paradigm by revolting against reason; and the political madman, whose sanity is often pathologised by a society that itself has lost its mind. Together, these paradigms of madness constitute an intertextual web of allusions and character types that have been embodied and amended over time.