Russian: Culture/Civ 20/21st Centuries

Social, cultural, and political institutions from the 1905 revolution to the present. Particular attention to tensions between official and unofficial culture during the Soviet period. Prerequisite: RUSS 2200.

Prerequisite: RUSS 2200. PACE students with permission and override

This advanced Russian course explores how writers, activists, and artists have used literature to document, resist, and reinterpret incarceration across Russia’s past and present—from the Soviet Gulag to the prisons of Putin’s Russia. Reading in the original Russian, students will engage with memoirs, short stories, and documentary prose by Varlam Shalamov, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and other survivors of the Soviet camp system, alongside contemporary texts and media by figures such as Aleksei Navalny and the feminist performance collective Pussy Riot. Through close reading, discussion, and creative projects, we will trace how carceral experience has shaped Russian moral, political, and artistic consciousness, asking how memory, faith, and dissent survive under repression. Emphasis will be placed on advanced reading, vocabulary development, and analytical writing in Russian.