From the beginning of the 18th c. French literature was a model for the new literature of Russia; the works of the classics of the age of Louis XIV were extensively translated and imitated. In the second half of the century the empress Catherine the Great, as part of her campaign to win a reputation for enlightenment, offered patronage to a number of French artists and writers. The sculptor Falconet was invited to St Petersburg to create the famous ‘Bronze Horseman’ statue of Peter the Great, and among literary visitors were Grimm and, above all, Diderot, who spent several months in the Russian capital in the winter of 1773-4 as a sign of his gratitude for Catherine's money and protection. One result of this was that Diderot's library and a set of his manuscripts were sent to Russia after his death; the books were dispersed (unlike Voltaire's library, which is still housed in St Petersburg), but the manuscripts were preserved.
Although the influence of German and English literature partly eclipsed French in the 19th c., French remained a normal language of communication for the upper classes. Much correspondence in French survives, as well as one major work of polemic, P. Y. Chaadayev's Lettres philosophiques (1829). Many Russian writers spent long periods in France; Turgenev, for instance, was a good friend of Flaubert. At the same time, a few French writers, notably Mérimée, Custine, and Dumas père, displayed an interest in Russia and Russian literature. When Turgenev tried to attract Flaubert to Pushkin, however, he met with the rejoinder: ‘Il est plat, votre poète’; it was only with Tolstoy and subsequently Dostoevsky (much admired by Gide among others) that Russian writers began to exert a serious influence on the French [see Vogüé].
In the 20th c. the two-way traffic has continued in different ways. Russian Symbolism owed a debt to the poets and theorists of France, whereas after the Bolshevik Revolution Russia provided a pole of attraction for many radically inclined writers. Aragon and Romain Rolland, for instance, sang the praises of the new society. Gide's Retour de l'URSS is the most famous of a number of accounts of disillusionment with the failed Utopia. At the same time, many important Russian émigré writers, such as the poets Khodasevich and Tsvetaeva, settled in Paris, and the French capital has remained one of the principal centres of Russian culture abroad.
[Peter France]
