Russian Intellectual and Cultural History, 1800-1917
Spring 2010
The tortured intellectual is one of the stereotypical figures of nineteenth-century Russia.
During the last century of tsarist rule, the juxtaposition of a growing literate and educated public and an obstinately autocratic state allowing for no significant popular participation forced intellectuals and their ideas to carry an especially heavy burden of social and political significance. We will spend a good deal of time analyzing literary and philosophical texts on the so-called “accursed questions” of the age: the relation of individual to society; beauty and the role of art; Russia’s identity; the nature of historical change; and the ethics of revolution. Lectures will address the contexts, audiences, and social-political impact of such texts. We will also be asking whether nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian intellectual life can/should be studied as a distinct and abstract field, or was inseparable from “cultural history” in a socially and aesthetically broader sense (including the visual arts, music, and entertainment).
Primary readings will include A. S. Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin; absurdist short stories by Nikolai Gogol; the memoirs of the revolutionary theorist Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts; Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s youth-cult novel What Is To Be Done?; Crime and Punishment or another novel of Fyodor Dostoevsky; Leo Tolstoy’s Confession; Andrei Bely’s symbolist novel of revolution, Petersburg; and selections from George Gibian, ed., The Penguin 19th-Century Russian Reader. Secondary reading will be mostly from James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture and Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism.
The two 75-minute classes each week will be divided between lecture and discussion. Grades will be based on a take-home midterm (20%), two interpretive-analytical papers on materials from the syllabus (40%), a final exam (20%), and participation in class discussions (20%).
There is no prerequisite for the course.
During the last century of tsarist rule, the juxtaposition of a growing literate and educated public and an obstinately autocratic state allowing for no significant popular participation forced intellectuals and their ideas to carry an especially heavy burden of social and political significance. We will spend a good deal of time analyzing literary and philosophical texts on the so-called “accursed questions” of the age: the relation of individual to society; beauty and the role of art; Russia’s identity; the nature of historical change; and the ethics of revolution. Lectures will address the contexts, audiences, and social-political impact of such texts. We will also be asking whether nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian intellectual life can/should be studied as a distinct and abstract field, or was inseparable from “cultural history” in a socially and aesthetically broader sense (including the visual arts, music, and entertainment).
Primary readings will include A. S. Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin; absurdist short stories by Nikolai Gogol; the memoirs of the revolutionary theorist Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts; Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s youth-cult novel What Is To Be Done?; Crime and Punishment or another novel of Fyodor Dostoevsky; Leo Tolstoy’s Confession; Andrei Bely’s symbolist novel of revolution, Petersburg; and selections from George Gibian, ed., The Penguin 19th-Century Russian Reader. Secondary reading will be mostly from James Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture and Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism.
The two 75-minute classes each week will be divided between lecture and discussion. Grades will be based on a take-home midterm (20%), two interpretive-analytical papers on materials from the syllabus (40%), a final exam (20%), and participation in class discussions (20%).
There is no prerequisite for the course.
