The session gives a brief introduction to the Silver Age in Russia (c. 1890-1917), a vibrant period of cultural flowering when the realism and naturalism of great Russian novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky gave way to the Symbolist poets and the avant-garde. Key names of the period are: Blok, Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, Bely, Stanislavsky and Meyerhold.