With victory in war, Russia became a newly great nation. And like Elizabethan England, or the United States after World War II, this newly great nation needed a homegrown national culture to proclaim its prominence and define its character. Censorship loosened and literacy rates grew, as did the number of people writing in Russian. As the State controlled what could be said on public stages, theater flourished in the first half of the nineteenth century on Russian private estates.
