The Other Russia: Freedom and Resistance in the Arts

Harvard FAS

A free-wheeling literary, theater, cinema, arts, and journalism scene flourished after the USSR collapsed, but Russia’s war in Ukraine and intensified authoritarianism have transformed the cultural scene into something more fragmented and harder to grasp. Our course will seek out and study remarkably divergent and bold material from the chaotic 1990s to the polarized present by writers, poets, filmmakers, and artists living abroad and in Russia.Russian culture’s long history of creative…