Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés. Prior to the nineteenth century Russia produced very little, if any, internationally read literature, but from around the 1830s Russian literature underwent an astounding golden age, beginning with the poet Aleksandr Pushkin and culminating in two of the greatest novelists in world literature, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the playwright Anton Chekhov. In the twentieth century leading figures of Russian literature included in Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova and Joseph Brodsky, and prose writers Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Nabokov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Mikhail Bulgakov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.