In 1613 the Zemsky Sobor elected Michael Romanov as tsar of Russia, ending the dynastic crisis and foreign intervention known as the Time of Troubles. The new Romanov dynasty restored central authority after famine, civil war, impostor rulers, and Polish-Lithuanian incursions. Its accession gave Muscovy a renewed political framework that would shape Russian identity for three centuries.

The Time of Troubles became a lasting reservoir of Russian historical memory, feeding chronicles, folk songs, drama, and later national poetry. Pushkin's Boris Godunov and Mussorgsky's opera drew on this era's anxieties about legitimacy, popular suffering, and the sacred burden of rule. The Romanov settlement helped create the political world in which later Russian literary culture defined itself against chaos, invasion, and autocracy.