Soviet & Post-Soviet Lit

(4 Credits)

This course is an introduction to Russian 20th-century fiction, concentrating on the two periods of greatest cultural ferment: 1920s modernism and late/post-Soviet postmodernism. After the 1917 revolution, Bolshevik ideology held that the Old World would be utterly destroyed, to be replaced by a new society populated by New Soviet Men. The experience of Russia in the 20th century can be viewed as the failed attempt to put radical theory into everyday practice, a grand scheme of social engineering that would inevitably be reflected in the country?s literature.