RUSS 373 - Seminar on Russian Literature

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Focused analysis of an author, work, theme, genre, or literary school in the nineteenth or twentieth century.

Topic for 2015/16b: Russian Literature of the Absurd. A survey of the absurdist current in Russian nineteenth and twentieth century literature, taking into account the relationship of this tradition to the religious and philosophical concepts of the time. The course involves a close reading of texts by Nikolai Gogol, the first Russian absurdist par excellence, Kozma Prutkov, a fictitious author of mind-bending aphorisms, and Vladimir Soloviev, Russia’s premier philosopher who contributed a number of notable items to the corpus of absurdist works. In the early twentieth century the absurdist mode became a prominent aspect of the Russian avant-garde, particularly in the works of such writers as Aleksei Kruchenykh and Velemir Khlebnikov, followed in the 1920s by Daniil Kharms and Aleksandr Vvedensky. Mr. Firtich.

Prerequisite: RUSS 331 or permission of the instructor.

Advanced seminar conducted in Russian.

One 3-hour period.