The Modern Period
Literature and Revolution
Drawing on fiction, autobiography, poetry, the short story, theatre, cinema, embedded journalism, and cultural criticism, our course will be exploring a series of creative responses to the long arc of the Russian revolution, which stretched from the Revolution of 1905 to World War I, the Revolutions of 1917, the Civil War, and the establishment of the Soviet Union, the first communist state in history. The course will be driven by three overarching questions: What is a revolution? Is a revolution an event, a series of events, or a process? Is it a ground-up movement or a top-down initiative? What social classes are involved? Is it an initiative of the masses, of disaffected intellectuals, or a struggle between political élites? How do different individuals respond to revolutionary change? What is the relationship between the means and ends of revolutionary action? What is the role of literature and art in revolutionary times? Are writers and intellectuals the voice of the privileged or of the oppressed? Do they serve as detached witnesses or as critics of their own society? Do they best serve their cause as untimely prophets or as timely agents of change? Should they insist on retaining their artistic freedom or channel their artistic gifts into political agitation and propaganda? What is the role of artistic form in representing, transforming, symbolizing or critiquing revolutionary history? How does the artistic genre, aesthetic orientation or discursive form of a given work determine the kind of story or testimony it offers? What kinds of symbols, tropes and narrative modes are invoked in these texts in the face of social crisis and radical change? We will be reading works by Maxim Gorky, John Reed, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Leon Trotsky, Emma Goldman, Sergei Eisenstein, Isaac Babel, Marina Tsvetaeva, Mikhail Bulganov, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Your work load will consist of group discussion postings and presentations, weekly reading blogs, a take-home midterm exam, a final paper, and final exam.