This course surveys the nineteenth-century Russian novel and considers its major themes: the meaning of life in the face of death; love, marriage, and adultery; women's fate in a patriarchal society; the individual, the collective, and the experience of modernity; the ideology of Empire; crime, punishment, and redemption; and the danger and promise of utopian thought. Our approach will be 1) to read and closely analyze a series of texts that became the foundation for the Russian novelistic tradition within their own contexts and 2) to explore how these texts speak to contemporary issues, our lives, and eternal questions that all of humanity faces. Authors will include Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Karolina Pavlova, Ivan Turgenev, Fedor Dostoevksy, and Lev Tolstoy.
- Teacher: Helen Stuhr-Rommereim