movement mazeppa 
Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia and its émigrés and to the Russian - language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Rus ', the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union . The roots of Russian literature can be traced to the Middle Ages , when epics and chronicles in Old Russian were composed . By the ___MASK88___ , literature had grown in importance , and from the early 1830s , Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age in poetry , prose and drama . ___MASK56___ permitted a flowering of poetic talent : Vasily Zhukovsky and later his protégé Alexander Pushkin came to the fore . Prose was flourishing as well . The first great Russian novelist was Nikolai Gogol . Then came Ivan Turgenev , who mastered both short stories and novels . Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky soon became internationally renowned . In the second half of the century Anton Chekhov excelled in short stories and became a leading dramatist . The beginning of the 20th century ranks as the Silver Age of Russian poetry . The poets most often associated with the " Silver Age " are Konstantin Balmont , Valery Bryusov , Alexander Blok , Anna Akhmatova , Nikolay Gumilyov , Osip Mandelstam , Sergei Yesenin , Vladimir Mayakovsky , Marina Tsvetaeva and Boris Pasternak . This era produced some first - rate novelists and short - story writers , such as Aleksandr Kuprin , Nobel Prize winner Ivan Bunin , Leonid Andreyev , Fyodor Sologub , Aleksey Remizov , Yevgeny Zamyatin , Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Andrei Bely . Mazeppa is a narrative poem written by the English romantic poet Lord Byron in 1819 . It is based on a popular legend about the early life of Ivan Mazepa ( 1639 -- 1709 ) , a Ukrainian gentleman who later became Hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks . According to the poem , the young Mazeppa has a love affair with a Countess Theresa while serving as a page at the Court of King John II Casimir Vasa . Countess Theresa was married to a much older Count . On discovering the affair , the Count punishes Mazeppa by tying him naked to a wild horse and setting the horse loose . The bulk of the poem describes the traumatic journey of the hero strapped to the horse . The poem has been praised for its `` vigor of style and its sharp realization of the feelings of suffering and endurance '' . This poem also inspired Alexander Pushkin to write his poem Poltava as an answer to Byron ' s poem . Published within the same covers with `` Mazeppa '' was the short story `` A Fragment '' , also known as `` Fragment of a Novel '' and `` The Burial : A Fragment '' , one of the earliest vampire stories in English . Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin was a Russian poet , playwright , and novelist of the Romantic era who is considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature .