RUSS 0810 - UTOPIA, SOCIALISM, DISSENT: INTRODUCTION TO MODERN RUSSIAN LITERATURE

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Is there a best way to reorganize our communities? What are the consequences of revolution? What is the responsibility of writers and of common citizens under authoritarian rule? How do people respond to radical social and political change? Celebrated works of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian literature tackle these and other, equally fundamental, questions. This course provides a dynamic introduction to some of the most influential works of Russian literature, texts produced in the midst of the social upheaval and political transformations that defined twentieth- and twenty-first-century Russian life. We will study the works of such writers as Bely, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Babel, Zoshchenko, Zamiatin, Platonov, Bunin, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Nabokov, Trifonov, Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Erofeev, Pelevin, Sorokin, Petrushevskaya, Tolstaya, and Alexievich with attention to their thematic and formal preoccupations, their historical contexts, and often fascinating histories of reception. We will cover the following periods: the Russian Silver Age, the Russian Revolutions, the Russian Civil War, the early Soviet period, Stalinism, World War II, the Thaw, the Stagnation era, Perestroika, the collapse of the USSR, post-Soviet culture, the Putin era. Topics of particular interest (vary from semester to semester and tend to) include utopianism in art and politics, revolutionary aesthetics, Russian emigre culture, totalitarianism, militarism, the Cold War, state socialism, human agency in the natural world, late-Soviet environmentalism, the cultural consequences of rapid political and economic reform, post-socialist postmodernity, and the literary consequences of political dissent.
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Course Requirements: PREQ: ENG 0102 or ENGCMP (0002 or 0006 or 0020 or 0200 or 0203 or 0205 or 0207 or 0208 or 0210 or 0212 or 0213 or 0214) or ENGFLM 0210 or FP (0003 or 0006) *Applies to all WRIT Courses*
Course Attributes: Russian & East European Studies, SCI Polymathic Contexts: Global&Cross Cul GE. Req., Writing Intensive Course (WRIT)

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