Serfdom and Liberation: Challenging the Legacies of Forced Labor

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Tsar Alexander II won the race to liberation when he freed the serfs in the empire in 1861 before Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, but serf and slave alike despite the promise of property and rights protected in law would struggle with poverty, discrimination, and oppression for generations. This course examines the Russian experience of serfdom and attempts at liberation primarily through literature of the nineteenth century but with examples of intercultural dialogue introduced to highlight Russia’s international reputation of repression with a range of genres by famous authors including Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. In English.