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

Allegedly unfit for human habitation, the city of Petersburg nevertheless turned out to be very hospitable to literary inspiration: in its relatively short history it gave rise a huge corpus of texts, many of them intricately interconnected. This connection appears to go further than their shared topic, their object of description: as if almost in separation from the *actual *city (which according to some scholarly sources has actually had occasional stretches of both decent weather and living conditions) texts of the city became connected through the centuries in a complex discourse, reminiscing about and arguing with each other. Starting from the “crucible” of all Petersburg poems, Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” (1833) these texts all reflect in some way on the disaster and innovation that was this city’s founding and that, paradoxically, became also the foundation for its unified cultural text. We will read two texts with which students may well be familiar (Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment", Bely's "Petersburg") paying special attention to their treatment of the urban, and texts which only recently have entered the zone of scholarly attention (poetry of the Siege of Leningrad, underground Leningrad literature created during the last decades of the Soviet Union, and literature produced in/about Petersburg today). We will look at theoretical analyses of Petersburg representation by Viktor Shklovsky, Nikolai Antsiferov, Lydiia Ginzburg, Yuri Lotman, Viktor Toporov, Ilya Kalinin, Sergey Yarov, among others, and further—we will apply to this case elaborations on literary urbanity by Walter Benjamin, Edward Soja and Robert Alter.

Prerequisite: Graduate standing or consent of instructor.

Repeat Rules