Imagining Moscow: Utopia and Urban Spaces in 20th-Century Russian Culture

The course explores the role of Moscow in the Russian collective imagery throughout the 20th century. We will study how different utopian visions of the city in art, literature, film, and architecture affected the radical transformations of its urban landscape from the October Revolution to the present. We will start with the 1920s and 1930s, when the image of a new Moscow became closely associated with the creation of new socialist ways of life, and conclude with the neoliberal facelift of the city in the post-Soviet period, retracing a history of 20th-century Russian culture through its urban imagination.