Literature of the 19th and 20th centuries.

This course explores the history and literature of revolutionary Russia from the middle of the nineteenth century to the Bolshevik revolution and the early years of Soviet power. Our course will focus primarily on the relationship between and revolution and the written word, examining works in multiple genres. From the nineteenth century we will read the autobiographies of major nineteenth-century revolutionaries such as the socialist Herzen and the anarchist Kropotkin as well as Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done?, which influenced generations of revolutionaries, and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, arguably the most significant counter-revolutionary work of the century. From the twentieth century we will be reading political theory by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and literary theory by Trotsky and Shklovsky, the diaries of the poets Zinaida Hippius and Marina Tsvetaeva recounting everyday life during the revolutions of 1917, texts of historical witnessing by John Reed and Victor Serge, works of revolutionary myth-making from Sergei Eisenstein’s October to Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Mystery-Buff, science fiction by Bogdanov and Zamyatin, and satirical works by Bulgakov and Zoshchenko. Over the course of the semester we will be asking the following questions. Is revolution an event or a process, and how might it be narrated? Is literature a mirror to history or can it also serve actively to project and shape change? What is the role of the individual and the collective in history? How did the principal literary genres – drama, the short story, the novel - as well as cinema serve the goal of imagining the revolution? How did political and literary theory animate the debates of the time? Was there room for satire and laughter in a socialist society? What does Russian literature teach us about the hopes and failures of revolutionary transformation?

This course is also being offered as Slavic 131.

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Requirements class fulfills