Love Meets History in Russ Lit

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The course will examine the relationship between history and personal lives of individuals as portrayed in Russian literature of the 19th and 20th century. Does History determine how human fates and relationships play out, or does a person have the freedom to chart the course of his or her life and relationships? We will examine approaches to these questions in the works of the nineteenth-century authors Alexander Herzen and LeoTolstoy, and their twentieth-century successor, Boris Pasternak. In addition to three novels that focus on love stories drawn against an increasingly “thick” historical background (Who Is to Blame?, Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago), we will read parts of Herzen’s autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, which presents the story of both his public and personal life.