Professor Pavel Khazanov
Are we Western or are we not? Are we the tsar’s trusted subjects or are we disloyal and dispensable? What is slavery and what is freedom? What is progress and where is God? For over a hundred years in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution, these “accursed questions” occupied Russia’s greatest writers and shaped their world-famous classic texts. Proceeding in modules, our class will read those texts to give an account of Russian everyday life, culture and politics from the late 1700s to the 1910s. Our books will include classics by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as writers less well known in the West. All readings in English. Satisfies Core Requirement AHp.