Spring 2010

RFW Non-Fiction: Reading Revolution:Memoirs Surrounding the Russian Revolution - LLST 3016 A

Professor(s):  Elizabeth Kendall 
Day(s):  MW
Time(s):  12:00 pm - 1:40 pm 
CRN:  4813
Credits:  4
Prerequisite(s):  Prerequisites: juniors and seniors only.

Course Description
This course examines one of the earthshaking events of modern history - the Russian revolution - and some of the ways in which journalists, memoirists, (and poets and filmmakers), reacted to its radical reconfiguring of their worlds. The course starts with the prototype--the French Revolution of 1789, and the vision of total societal transformation it unleashed on the world. It then leaps to Russia’s decaying imperial regime in 1917, the mass popular revolution, followed by a revolutionary coup, which resulted in the urgent need to rebuild a vast world from the ground up. Students examine eyewitness accounts of these events by journalists and memoirists; compare analyses from historians and revolutionary activitists; and encounter the radical attempts by writers (such as Zoshchenko, Nabokov, Shklovsky, Tsvetayeva), using several nonfiction modes, to delineate the confounding new world of the revolution’s aftermath, even as they questioned the very artistic languages they worked in.