Russian Modernist Poetry: Keys to Mysteries

In this course, we will examine the most renowned poems written by Russian modernist poets and read them as detective mysteries requiring the analytical skills of a philologist-detective. One of the main goals of the course is to systematically explore Russian poetry from the 1890s to the 1920s. The poems we will analyze include works by the Symbolists (Valery Bryusov, Alexander Blok, Innokenty Annensky), the Acmeists (Nikolai Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam), the Futurists (Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak), and the poets of the OBERIU group (Alexander Vvedensky and Daniil Kharms). Counts as a course in literature.