 By the 1880s, the age of the great novelists was over, and short fiction and poetry became the dominant genres.The next several decades became known as the Silver Age of Russian Poetry, when the previously dominant literary realism was replaced by symbolism.Leading authors of this era include such poets as Valery Bryusov, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Alexander Blok, Nikolay Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, and novelists Leonid Andreyev, Ivan Bunin, and Maxim Gorky.