RUSS 388 - From Lenin to Putin: Soviet Experience and its Aftermath through Film, Literature, & Human Document

This course explores Soviet culture and its aftermath in Russia through the prism of human experience as encoded in films as well as works of literature and personal documents, such as diaries and memoirs. The question of the role played by cinema in both organizing and reflecting human experience will be of particular interest to us. We will also study how lives and identities of ordinary people were affected by the revolutions, utopian ideology, totalitarian government, political terror, and partial modernization. The themes include the reforms of calendar; organization of industrial time; city and house planning; communal living; pedagogical undertakings (the concept of New Men and Women); regulating family, sexuality, and gender; living through terror and forms of resistance to it; the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire as lived experience. We will conclude with surveying main social, cultural, and political developments in post-Soviet Russia. Our primary sources will include both artistic masterpieces (films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Larisa Shepitko, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Aleksei Balabanov, Sergei Loznitsa and others; writings by Nadezhda Teffi, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lidiya Ginzburg, Svetlana Alexievich and others) as well as testimonial and personal writings. We will also read critical and historical texts. All readings and discussions will be in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): For Russian credit: RUSS 212 or equivalent.
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): LIT 388
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).