HIST2257 - Russia's 20th-Century: History Through Literature

To study Russia’s twentieth-century history through its literature is to come face-to-face with a country for which works of fiction have often served, as the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn put it, as “a second government.” Russia is a society that takes literature seriously—one in which the pen is assumed to have direct historical consequences. In this course, we will study how twentieth-century Russian literature actively participated in war, revolution, totalitarian dictatorship, and resistance. The masterworks we will study open windows into worlds of revolutionary rapture and moral uplift in the face of tyranny, of history as a gigantic wheel that lifts some people up even as it crushes others. Our readings will range from an avant-garde play intended to rewire your mind, to an epic representation of revolutionary social transformation, to surreal and absurdist representations of a world gone mad. In other words: fasten your seatbelts low and tight; turbulence ahead!