When the novelist Ivan Turgenev heralded the Russian language as “great, powerful, truthful, and free,” he was thinking of the national oral tradition – fairy-tales, epic poems, folk songs – as well as his outstanding literary predecessors and contemporaries: Alexander Pushkin, Vasily Zhukovsky, Nikolay Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Lev Tolstoy. Since Turgenev’s time, the language of Russian literature, along with the vernacular, evolved, giving life to the figurative and literary experimentation of Russian Modernism, the insightful whimsicality and “beyondsensical” wordplay of avant-garde poets, and the lucid, straightforward, but also elegant prose of Russian philosophers, natural scientists and historians.