What are the outstanding writers and works in Russian literary fiction writing?

The prosperity of Russian literature is shown by the large number of writers, the number of masterpieces, and their variety. Novels such as Goncharov's Oblomov (1859), Turgenev's The Night Before (1860) and Fathers and Sons (1862), Chernyshevsky's What Shall We Do? (1860), Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (1864), and Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869). Short stories, essays, and compositions such as Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter (1852), Scheindlin's Essays on the Foreign Province (1856), plays such as Ostrovsky's The Great Thunderstorm (1860), and poems such as Nekrasov's long poem Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? (1863-1877), etc. On the theoretical side, Chernyshevsky put forward the famous thesis that "beauty is life", and his thesis "The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality" (1885) made a significant contribution to materialist aesthetics.

The emergence of Turgenev marked the period of prosperity. After writing the images of the "superfluous man", Rotin (novel of the same name, 1856), Lavretsky (The House of Nobles, 1960), he quickly turned to the creation of the "new man", which was the first in the series of images. The so-called "new man" refers to the common intellectuals, i.e. "educated representatives of the liberal democratic bourgeoisie, who are not aristocrats, but officials, commoners, merchants, peasants." Goncharov's Oblomov (the novel of the same name) was almost the end of the image of the "superfluous man".

Chernyshevsky's What to Do? went on to offer a number of images of "new people". At this time, plays such as The Great Thunderstorm by Ostrovsky (1823-1886) and Nekrasov's (1821-1898) Who Can Be Happy and Free in Russia? broadened the scope of literary representation of life in drama and poetry, respectively. The former brought to the stage such lower-middle-class characters as merchants, actors, teachers, shopkeepers and waiters, while the latter introduced peasants and petty intellectuals into literature.