This module offers students the opportunity to study some of the great works of nineteenth-century Russian fiction by authors such as Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Russian writers were convinced that their country's literature had been too dependent on European models and they set out consciously to create a distinctly 'Russian' tradition. What did this involve and why subsequently were the works of the authors like Dostoevsky and Chekhov received so rapturously when they became available in English translations at the beginning of the twentieth century? We will also examine this writing in its social, historical and political context, which raises questions regarding the significance of gender, censorship and empire.