Advanced studies in the several fields of Slavic literatures and linguistics. Content varies.

This seminar offers an in-depth exploration of the literature and cultural history of the Thaw, a period in Soviet history that extends in its broadest sense from the death of Stalin in 1953 to the reversal of political and cultural liberalization in the late 1960s. The Thaw was a moment shaped by contradictory aspirations of transformation and reaffirmation, when the urge to rejuvenate the Soviet project pushed constantly against the anxiety that too much reform could endanger the foundations of the project itself. The temporality of the period was also doubled, looking forward to a more perfectly realized socialism even as the return of Gulag prisoners and the re-evaluation of the Stalinist past created new forms of historical consciousness. In the fields of literature and cinema, the relaxation of censorship and greater access to cultural materials from abroad (especially the West) produced a surge in aesthetic innovation, driven by a move away from the ossified socialist realism of the late Stalin period and a return to both the legacies of the nineteenth-century classics and the heritage of modernism. The conflicts at the heart of the Thaw—over historical memory and the relationship between the state and culture—proved formative for the development of Russian society and culture through the second half of the twentieth century and up to the present. Our seminar will take advantage of a wealth of recent scholarship that has deepened our understanding of the contradictory dynamics at the heart of the Thaw, drawing attention to questions of memory, sincerity, space, and the revival of internationalism. In literature, we will explore the return to nineteenth-century realism (Pasternak, Grossman); the rise of youth prose and the return to modernism (Aksenov, Bitov, Sinyavsky); the dramatic renewal of lyric poetry as a cultural and social force (Akhmadulina, Evtushenko, Voznesenskii, Brodskii); the formation of a new women’s prose (Baranskaia); and the emergence of the Gulag as a theme of both published and unpublishable literature (Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov). The seminar will also range beyond literature to consider developments in cinema (Kalatozov, Shepitko, Khutsiev, Muratova), visual art, and guitar poetry (Vysotskii, Okudzhava). At the end of the class, we will consider how the final years of the Thaw laid the ground for the cultural dynamics that would shape the 1970s and late Soviet culture.

Prerequisites: Graduate standing, permission of instructor.

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