Civil War, Revolution, and a New Culture

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was one of the most significant events of the 20th century. The Revolution exerted a dominant influence on all aspects of Russian life, including literature. Literature not only reflected the events of the Revolution (and the Civil War as an important stage of the Revolution) with exceptional vividness, but it also attempted to interpret them artistically. Revolutionary events influenced not only the content of new literature, but also its form, its composition by genre, and its aesthetic principles. Because of this, Russian literature of the 1910s-1920s became one of the most interesting and significant artistic phenomena of the 20th century. We will investigate works of renowned and lesser known Russian writers of the 1910s-1920s that reflect aspects of the 1917 Revolution from different, often opposing, perspectives. We will read poets (Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Zinaida Gippius, and others), writers of prose (Ivan Bunin, Aleksey Tolstoy, Mikhail Sholokhov, Marietta Shaginian, Artem Vesely, Anatoly Marienhof, Boris Lavrenev, Boris Pilniak, and others), and publicists (Vasily Rozanov, Larisa Reysner). We will examine literature as it relates to historical events, as well as to the visual art, theater, and film of its time.