Life is Short: Introduction to the Russian Short Story

Russian literature may be best known in the West for producing big lumbering novels, novels thicker than bricks—think War & Peace, Brothers Karamazov, or Gulag Archipelago—but from the beginning of the nineteenth century on, many of its greatest prose masterpieces emerge from a seemingly lesser, though nimbler genre—the short story. In this course we will read classic short works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov and others, and learn to analyze them in a sophisticated way; we will also learn about Russian culture, and, more broadly, what makes literature what it is. All readings in English.