Russian winter is not just a very cold weather with frost and snow. It is a beautiful and even romantic time, which always was an inspiration for many Russian writers, poets, artists and musicians. Their works help people to understand not only charm of Russian winter, but to get to know peculiarity of mysterious Russian soul. Today we'll proudly show you some poems about Russian winter by the best Russian poets in English translation. Enjoy!

Russian proverbs and sayings are keen winged expressions created by Russian people, or translated from ancient written sources and borrowed from literary works; they express wise ideas and thoughts in concise and witty form.

The Captain's Daughter (Kapitanskaya dochka)- historical novel written by Alexander Pushkin. It is a common knowledge that the poetry of Alexander Pushkin cannot be translated well. That’s why Pushkin is not so famous abroad as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. But there are some novels, written in prose, that are worth reading to understand the great gift of the greatest Russian national poet.

The account of Russian writers’ world-known works addressed to children and youth should be started from the first third of the 19th century.

The sparkling term Golden Age is referred to the first half, or to be more exact, the first forty years of the 19th century. This period is remarkable for an unprecedented upsurge of creativity illuminated by the genius of Alexander Pushkin. It was the poetry of the early 19th century that turned to be the impetus, which still goes on driving Russian literature forth

With the end of the 19th century “the Golden Age” of Russian literature finished giving place to a crucial stage that later went down into history under the beautiful name of the Silver Age. It engendered a great flight of Russian culture, at the same time becoming a beginning of its tragic fall down.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s assumption of office in 1985 and the following epoch of glasnost (i.e. publicity) in Soviet mass media, including press, brought about sweeping changes into Russian literature.

In the early 1960s the demand for greater freedom of artistic expression in literature and arts manifested itself with new power, especially by efforts of “the angry young men”, the most well-known of whom became poets Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko and Andrey Andreyevich Voznesensky.

Stalin’s strengthening of his dictatorship in the early 1930s predetermined total submission of literature and art. In 1932 the Central Committee ordered to dismiss all literary associations and establish a single all-national Union of Soviet Writers, which was founded two years later at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers.

The first turbulent years after 1917, when in accord with new social forces released by overthrow of autocracy there appeared numerous confronting literary groupings, were the only revolutionary period of literature development in the Soviet Union.

Unusual flourishing of Russian realistic literature in the second half of the 19th century was going on against the background of social and political distemper that started in the 1840s, under the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855).

The first forty years of the 19th century are called the Golden Age of Russian poetry, and it is certainly due to the greatest Russian poet Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799–1837), whose first triumph was the poem Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820).

The inevitable consequence of Russian and West European literatures drawing together was that the former, being less mature fell under the influence if the latter as a more developed one. With the introduction of a more refined lifestyle in the courts of the post-Peter the First epoch the encouraging of sciences and arts became sort of a fashion. Subtle poetry starts to be appreciated.

As compared to West European countries Rus’ adopted Christianity rather late, not before the 10th century. Initial development of Russian literature was under the influence of Byzantium, i.e. the Eastern Roman Empire with the capital of Constantinople.

Great Russian poets and writers have always been the voice of this people's conscience and soul, and had to suffer for it.