RUSS 365 - Kiev, Odessa, and the Steppes: Ukrainian Imagination and Russian Literature

Russia’s war against Ukraine compels us to examine and revisit the complex and rich history of Ukrainian-Russian coexistence and the prominence of Ukrainian imagination in Russian literature. This course will accomplish this goal by studying how Ukrainian spaces; characters; historical events, including such catastrophes as Holodomor and the Holocaust; and philosophies of identity were constructed and portrayed by eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century writers. We shall begin with the old documents originating from Kievan Rus, the birthplace of Ukrainian and Russian civilizations, and proceed with the eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century works of various genres, including short stories, poetry, novels, and philosophical essays. Among the writers we shall study are Grigorii Skovoroda, Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Marko Vovchok, Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Vladimir Jabotinsky, Alexander Kuprin, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Eduard Bagritskii, Vasilii Grossman, Boris Slutskii, Konstantin Paustovskii, Anatolii Kuznetsov, Friedrich Gorenstein.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Prerequisite(s): For Russian credit: RUSS 220
Instructional Method: Lecture-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Cross-listing(s): LIT 365
Not offered: 2024-25
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).