The Modern Period

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.