That all was the last gasp of the remarkable Russian literary golden age, from Pushkin to Gorki. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, that whole lot, emerged over a period of less than 90 years. Add to that music and art. A huge achievement for a backwards country at the edge of civilization. It was a brilliant time, right up to 1917.
Rand and Nabokov and Pasternak were products of the last years of that golden age, fleeing when young and making their careers in an alien language, or in Pasternaks case, remarkably, surviving the worst of the troubles.
There has been nothing like that golden age since.
Keep in mind that Nabokov left Russia as a teenager, never to return. Rand left at age 20 or so.