19th Century Russian Masterpieces

Catalog description

Russian literature of the 19th century was shaped by its engagement with the so-called accursed questions—"accursed" for being urgent and inescapable but possibly unanswerable. What is the self? What is the meaning of life and of death? What is truth? What is justice? What does it mean to live a righteous life? In Russia these existential quandaries fell within the purview not only of philosophers but also of the poets and prose writers we will consider in this course. While the course roughly follows the chronology of the 19th century, it is structured around these accursed questions rather than by literary movement or genre. There are two reasons for this. First, Russia's literary culture began to develop later than other traditions; as a result, Russian authors of the 19th century were exposed to many different movements and often participated in several at once. Second, and relatedly, many authors worked across genres and in dialogue with philosophers, critics, novelists, and poets. They published in "thick journals," composed of texts ranging from the literary to the journalistic to the academic. For these reasons, it is difficult to categorize these authors along stylistic or generic lines. As philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev observes, what united them was an abiding interest in the most profound existential questions. Students in this course will examine how an author's use of genre, affiliation with particular literary movements, and socio-political commitments inflected their treatment of the accursed questions. Students will become familiar with not only the cultural artifacts of this fertile century but also the circumstances—historical, cultural, institutional—in which these artifacts were created. They will also be encouraged to reflect on how these perennial accursed questions are articulated at present, and what that reveals about our own socio-political…