Topics in Russian & Slavic Studies

The slippage between “Russian” and “Soviet” has meant that courses on Soviet culture have all too often been exclusively devoted to Russian writers, filmmakers, and artists. This course aims to examine specifically non-Russian cultural production, its historical and institutional background as well as aesthetic patterns. Starting with the cultural reactions to the 1917 Revolution on the empire’s peripheries, we will then examine the theoretical and practical question of how a system of multi-national Soviet literature, cinema, and other arts was constructed in the interwar period, and finally reflect on the role of non-Russian cultural producers in articulating a common Soviet, or conversely, nationalist identities in the late-Soviet era. In the process, we will read some of the best writers and watch some of the most interesting filmmakers of the Soviet era such as Alexander Dovzhenko, Chinghiz Aitmatov, Sergei Parajanov, Fazil Iskander, Mikhail Kalatozov, and Svetlana Alexievich.