Roaring Twenties: Literature, Arts, and Politics in Post-Revolutionary Russia

Catalog description

The goal of this seminar is to explore the cultural, artistic, and ideological diversity of the 1920s, with the focus on ideological and political confrontations resulting in the dogmatism of the later Stalinist period. We’ll examine literary practitioners, along with the cultural and literary politics of the 1920s and 30s. As the Communist Party moved from War Communism to New Economic Policy, so did the cultural and artistic discourse, producing innovative texts of the early Soviet Period (Gladkov, Bulgakov, Fadeev, Mayakovsky). Equally fascinating was the critical polemics of the period that clashed Trotsky with Blok, or Buharin with Zamiatin.