Coverage of major movements and genres in the intellectual context of the times. Readings in Russian.

This seminar surveys developments in the Russian literary field from the Second World War to 1991. We will explore different ways of periodizing this half-century. What if any correlation arises between literary appellations such as socialist realism, village prose, urban prose, samizdat, conceptualism, and postmodernism and the cycles of political history designated by terms such as late socialism, the Thaw, Era of Stagnation, and Perestroika/Glasnost’? Central to our investigations will be questions of continuity and rupture. How does the postwar relate to the literary and cultural legacies of the 1920s and 1930s, including the doctrine of Socialist Realism and the historical avant-garde? How should we understand the relationship between “official” and “unofficial” literature (including the culture of samizdat) in the late Soviet period? How did the great wave of publications of previously censored literature under glasnost’ transform literary production and the social role of literature? We will also consider a range of critical and theoretical responses to postwar literature. How have scholars conceptualized the relationships between historical change and literary form in this period? Can we speak of a Russian “postmodernism”? What might be its distinguishing characteristics? What role did late-Soviet literature play in memorializing the traumatic historical experiences of the Stalin era? Authors to be read include Ol’ga Berggol’ts, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov, Venedikt Erofeev, Iurii Trifonov, Valentin Rasputin, Chingiz Aitmatov, Fazil Iskander, Iosif Brodskii, Dmitrii Prigov, Lidiia Ginzburg, Liudmila Petrushevskaia.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.