Literature Between Two Wars, 1914 – 1941



The Soviet 1920s-1930s featured two opposing strains of literature. One had Fadeev, Furmanov, Serafimovich, and so-called Socialist Realism; the other included Babel, Olesha, Zoshchenko, Zamiatin, Bulgakov, Platonov. Gothic Soviet thrillers and the culture of laughter, the psychology of social envy and female types of the NEP period, the creation of a socialist narrative—these are the topics to be investigated in this course.