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RUSS 241 -- Great Russian Writers

Expanded course description

Great Russian writers have delved into some of the most contemporary and most timeless questions facing human beings, such as human morality, religious beliefs, social hierarchy, the subjection of one group of people to another in the form of serfdom, women's rights, and even the very status of the writer and artist in society. "What is the meaning of art?" Tolstoy asked, and the question is one that many Russian writers have tried to answer, creating a body of literature which continues to set a world-class artistic standard today.

Students in this course read works by masters of Russian, indeed world, literature: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Pushkin, Goncharov, and others. Two important women writers, Rostopchina and Pavlova, will also be read. While students may be aware that classic Russian literature addresses many universal problems, it also addressed issues which were the leading questions of its time period, such as socialism, scientific progress, then-new social discourses such as psychology and law, controversy over women's rights and women's education, marriage politics, the defensibility of autocracy, the right way to intervene in politics (terrorism was a common event in nineteenth-century Russia), the liberation and education of enserfed peasants, and Russia's status as a country caught between Europe and Asia and as a world empire.

Russian literature was very topical, very politically engaged, and studying it allows not only a window into an art form and another culture, but into the world of politics and the lively issues of what was at the time the peak of modernity, a society similar in many ways to our own.

Students will learn about romanticism, realism, and the novel, and close attention will be paid to forms of narrative. Students will write weekly response papers, help to lead discussion, take a midterm exam and write a final paper. Films will be used in class along with course readings.

Group: A&L

Offered 200303.

Syllabus

Although syllabi can change from term to term, a syllabus may provide further information about typical instances of this course.

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