COURSE SYLLABUS
The course seeks to investigate the common values of very different from each other masterpieces by some of the outstanding poets and novelists of the Russian 20th Century. On the background of the radical transformations of Russian literary civilization from the “fin de siécle” modernism to the dogmatism of “proletarian writers” after October Revolution, and to the Socialist realism canon, the following topics will be presented in a roughfly cronological order:
- The Silver Age. Decadentism and Symbolism.
- The poetic world of Alexandr Blok (1880-1921). The most eminent of the Russian Symbolists, Blok developed from the ethereal verses about the Beautiful Lady (Stixi o prekrasnoj dame, 1904) to his powerful mature manner by 1916. The intoxication of love, the spiritual destiny of his homeland, the uncertainty of modern times are some of the main themes of his greatest poems. At first enthusiastic about Revolution, perceived as a sort of natural cataclysm, he soon suffered the agonizing limitations on the artistic creation during the civil war.
- The poetry of Anna Akhmatova (1889-1965). One of the most talented and, at the same time, popular poets of the prerevolutionary Russia, Akhmatova shared the dramatic fate of writers and common people during Stalin’s terror. When her son was imprisoned, she composed the poem Requiem. Throughout her life she succeded in combining a classical manner, in which one feels the legacy of Pushkin, with constant poetic innovation. Among all Russian writers of the period considered Akhmatova remains the iconic representative of the time.
- Boris Pasternak (1890-1966), the poet and novelist. Pasternak began to write verses within the futurist group Centrifuge, but became an acclaimed poet in the twenties. His celebrated novel «Doctor Zhivago» (Doktor Živago) clearly stands out from the other soviet fictional works. The action of the novel starts in 1903 and ranges more than twenty years. Through the consciousness of the hero, Iurii Zhivago, the reader is presented with historical events as well as with Zhivago’s personal experiences and changes. The narrative ultimately demonstrates that the important thing in human life is not subservience in ideology, but inner freedom and faith in life conquering death. Written in a personal not realistic style, the novel was censored in Soviet Union, it was published in Italy in 1957 and its author was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1958.
- Unconventional prose of the twenties and thirties: «We» by Evgenii Zamiatin (1884-1937), and «The Master and Margarita» by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940). The novels were originally published abroad and were printed in Russia only during the years of «glasnost’» along with Akhmatova’s «Requiem» and Pasternak’s «Doctor Zhivago». Both provide illustrations of Russia’s twentieth-century tragic experience.
E.Zamiatin’s «We» (My), a modernist novel, was published in Russia only in 1988. It is set in a future society, the Single State ruled by the Benefactor, where everybody must conform to the official rules. Nevertheless in this dystopic future, where mathematical principles are dominant, Zamiatin introduce motifs such as love, dreams, and vivid stylized imagery, challenging reason and logic. «We» has been the source of inspiration for G.Orwell’s «1984» and has become a classical novel on the survival of human soul oppressed by technology, political and cultural dogma.
M.Bulgakov’s «The Master and Margarita» (Master i Margarita) presents a plot where three narrative levels interweave: the story of a writer, censored and separate from the woman he loves; the satyrical discredit of the socialist realism myth through the arrival of Mephisto in Moscow; the story of the meeting of Pontius Pilato with Jesus Christ. The unifying theme of the three levels is the power of truth and the written word in an age of tyranny, whether this be Stalin’s Russia or the Holy Land under Roman Empire.