 This period, known also as the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, began with Alexander Pushkin, who is considered the founder of the modern Russian literary language and often described as the "Russian Shakespeare".It continued with the poetry of Mikhail Lermontov and Nikolay Nekrasov, dramas of Alexander Ostrovsky and Anton Chekhov, and the prose of Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev.Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky have been described by literary critics as the greatest novelists of all time.