Fighting For a Freedom of Thought: Censorship and Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries

Catalog description

In the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, the institution of censorship was especially harsh and politically important. Permanent pressure caused the intense development of self-censorship among the loyal writers and the flourishing of roundabout artistic language. Studying the history of censorship in Russia helps us also understand authoritarian tendencies in Putin's Russia. During the course we will read the historical documents and literary texts to examine the conflicts between writers and censors and the development of symbolic orders in the different periods of Russian cultural history. Some of the discussion topics include censorship as a social institution and its influence on public space; relationship between the authors, censorship, and public; correlation between the aim of censorship (aspects of a given work that controllers consider "dangerous"), actual aesthetic and political "focus" of a text, and its innovative features; an official ban as a spur for the readers' attention.