20th-Century Russian Culture: The Soviet Experiment and its Aftermath
RUSS 2050
3 hours
20th-Century Russian Culture: The Soviet Experiment and its Aftermath
Course Description
Russian culture in the twentieth century. Examines both high culture (literature, art, architecture, classical music) and low or popular culture (film, popular music, various aspects of daily life) within the framework of the historical and political development of the period. No knowledge of Russian required.
Athena Title
20th-Century Russian Culture
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student Learning Outcomes
Students will analyze and explain historical and social context that brought about the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the formation of The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Students will interpret social and cultural conditions that engendered the period of artistic experimentation known as the Russian Avant-Garde (early 1900s-1929).
Students will identify and compare different movements of the Russian Avant-Garde and understand their relationship with the momentous political, social, and cultural changes in the first decade of the Soviet Union.
Students will analyze a variety of artistic responses to political, social, and cultural changes with the three main stages of Soviet era: a) the Revolution and its aftermath, b) the Stalin’s Reign of Terror, and c) the post-Stalin period.
Topical Outline
Brief survey of Russian pre-twentieth century history and culture
The Silver Age (visual art, modernist poetry, Diagilev's Ballets russes,
music of Stravinsky, Rachmaninov, and Scriabin)
Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater
Andrei Bely's novel "Petersburg"
Ivan Bunin's "The Gentleman from San Francisco"
The Revolution of 1917
The last Romanovs and Grigory Rasputin
Lenin
Avant-garde art (Malevich, Filonov, Tatlin)
Literature in the 1920s (Babel, Pilnyak, Bulgakov)
The filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein
Soviet-era architecture
Stalin and the purges of the 1930s
Anna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem"
The Great Patriotic War (1941-1945)
The Siege of Leningrad
The arts during WWII
Dmitry Shostakovich's Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony
The history and design of the Moscow subway
The death of Stalin and The Thaw, Nikita Khruschev and the denunciation of the
cult of personality
Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "Matryona's House"
The "Stagnation" period
The short stories of Tatyana Tolstaya
Dissidence and emigration; Sakharov
The short stories of Sergei Dovlatov
Gorbachev, perestroika and the coup of 1991
Russia during the post-glasnost' period (the 1990s)
The wars in Chechnya; the film "The Prisoner of the Mountains"
Postmodernism. The short stories of Victor Pelevin.
General Education Core
CORE IV: World Languages and Global Culture CORE IV: Humanities and the Arts
