Russia in Revolution (English)

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

What happens when a country abandons a three-hundred-year way of life, enters into repeated revolution and war, seeks heaven-on-earth, but achieves inferno and hell? Even more contradictory, perhaps, what happens when, at the same time, this country so revamps literature, film, painting, and dance that it leads the arts in Europe in the beginning of the twentieth century? "Russia in Revolution (1890-1925)" is an interdisciplinary, multi-media course on Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Topics to be considered are the dynamics of revolution and war; the form and function of utopia and dystopia; the nature of imprisonment, liberation, and exile (physical, social, spiritual, and aesthetic); and, the nostalgia for Imperial Russia and the dismay at the new Soviet state. Other themes are: the "lost" man, woman, and child in the early twentieth century; the conflict between city and country, "old" and "new," Russia and the West; the interplay of "patriarchal," "maternal," and "messianic" voices; and. the role of memory and myth (archetypal, classical, and personal) A crucial component will be the tie of literature to film, painting, and dance in the critique of fin de siecle modernity and its implications for humankind.