Natural School

Natural School (Russian:Натуральная школа - Natura′lnaya Shko′la) is a term applied to the literary movement which arose under the influence of Nikolai Gogol in the 1840s in Russia, and included such diverse authors as Nikolai Nekrasov, Ivan Panayev, Dmitry Grigorovich, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Hertzen, Ivan Goncharov, Vladimir Dal, Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Evgeny Grebyonka, among others. Modern day Russian historians of literature use the term only in its historical context, otherwise preferring to speak of "the earliest stage of critical realism in Russia."