Russian Lit: Surveying the Field

Catalog description

From a magical kingdom guarded by dragons, to an ambitious engineer ready to sell his soul to the devil for the secret of three magic cards, to a WWII exiled couple struggling with the inter-generational trauma on the streets of New York: this course will offer a survey of the most beloved canonical exemplars of 19th and 20th century Russian literature as well as lesser known texts in the form of fairytales, skazs, and short stories. We will engage in student-centered class discussions of the assigned readings, and will attempt to make meaning of the texts in their broader historical, social, artistic, and intellectual context. Among the writers we will read are: Alexander Pushkin, Evdokia Rastopchina, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov, Leonid Andreyev, Vladimir Nabokov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Vladimir Sorokin, Dina Rubina, and many others.