Fulfills Honors College Global Competence requirement
crosslisted with Comparative Literature 01:195:348:01
In English. No prerequisites.
In this course we read stories that reflect experiences of Russian life, ranging from a happy childhood on an aristocratic estate to the suffering of a Soviet labor camp. Authors include Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Shalamov, Brodsky, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Sadulaev, and Alexievich. When writing about their lives in autobiographies, memoirs, essays, diaries, or documentary prose, how do writers construct a self in the process of producing a text? How do they fashion a text that reflects the self? How do they select which experiences to represent or to omit? Where are the boundaries between fact and fiction? We study the relationship between the individual and community, between personal life and dramatic historical events; between memory and invention; we explore the themes of childhood, first love, emigration, and confinement. New additions to this course’s readings will help us reflect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, and on issues of empire and violence in post-Soviet space. All readings and discussions are in English. There are no prerequisites. Fulfills SAS core goal WCd. Fulfills Honors College Global Competence requirement.