The Russian Novel

Catalog description

Close reading of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky's Possessed, Andrey Bely's Petersburg, Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, Nabokov's The Gift, and Makine's Memoirs of my Russian Summers. Discussions will focus on these representative writers' changing perceptions of, and responses to social and ethical issues and of creativity, itself, as the genre evolved in the modern times between the 1870s and now. Final research paper required and can include in-depth discussion of one of the works or the comparison of one or more aspects of several texts. Taught in English.