Global Arc

Throughout the 20th century, Soviet cities were epicenters of political upheavals and intense artistic experimentation. They were sites of utopian urban planning, mass industrial labor, and monumental architecture. Yet, they were also spaces where the Socialist experiment became a lived, everyday reality through communal apartments, workers clubs, and public transit. This course explores the city through the century's most innovative novels, poetry, and short fiction. From avant-garde writers to non-conformist dissidents, we will trace key aesthetic currents as we examine the relationship between physical geography and cultural imaginary.

This course offers an introduction to contemporary Ukrainian literature. The political liberalization after the fall of the Soviet Union brought new freedoms of expression to the region but also an influx of globalization, consumerism, and capitalist modes of artistic production. We will examine how contemporary writers responded to communist and imperial legacies as they experimented with genres and carved out a new, national literature. We will also explore the interplay of regional, national, and linguistic identities. All works will be read in English.

The course will provide an overview of the most significant trends and periods in the development of Russian cinema from the 1960s until the latest blockbusters (2000s). The course will concentrate on the development of main genres and styles, major directors and productions, issues of art, race, gender, war and violence in Soviet, post-Soviet and new Russian cinema. All films will be screened with English subtitles.

In the early 1900s, Realism, the dominant tradition in Russian art and literature of the 19th century, faced a series of challenges that culminated in the avant-garde movements of the 1910s. Bracketed between these extremes, lies the World of Art group, an association of artists that modernized Russian art while still paying homage to artistic tradition. The work of the World of Art artists will be featured in "Russia's Age of Elegance," an exhibition on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, Feb.- June 2006. The course includes background material on earlier Russian art and a close examination of Russian art between 1898 and 1924.

What unites the diverse literary-philosophical movement of Existentialism is a focus on concrete human existence. While other schools of art and thought distract one from personal existence, Existentialism forces one to grapple personally with life's big questions. Franz Kafka puts it well: "A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." Course topics include desire, grief, deception, anxiety, despair, nihilism, authenticity, guilt, the leap of faith, the absurd, the problem of evil, death, and the meaningful life. With focus on Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, readings also include Nietzsche, Tolstoy, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Kafka.

"Moscow/Petersburg: Russia through Two Capitals." This interdisciplinary course explores Russian culture through Russia's two capitals: Moscow and St. Petersburg. We will traverse these cityscapes as historical, cultural, and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day - in literary works, historical accounts, art, and film. We will investigate the sites of key landmarks, including the Moscow metro, the Hermitage and Red Square, in order to excavate the layers of cultural history which underlie contemporary Russian identity.

A seminar to accompany Princeton's world premiere of the Meyerhold-Prokofiev production, rehearsed and then abandoned in 1937, of Pushkin's historical drama [Boris Godunov ]. Topics include the Russian "Time of Troubles" (1604-1615), Pushkin as dramatist (1820s), Meyerhold's modernist theatre (1910s-1930s), and Prokofiev as composer of stage music. We will measure this production against the norms of Stalinist performance art - and then suggest why it would have been a political and artistic scandal.

This seminar provides an introduction to the avant-garde projects that flourished in Russia from the Bolshevik revolution through the 1920s: Constructivism and production art, experimental film and theater, photomontage and factography. Our inquiry into this moment of unprecedented artistic experimentation will address formal and critical innovations (modernism, operativism, biomechanics), ideological agendas (art as a force to transform social relations in everyday life), and historical contexts (the Civil War and the new mass cultural formations of a nascent spectacle society).

Responding to the widespread injustices and social inequalities of their day, Russian writers turned to their literary craft to wrestle with the essential question: "What is to be done?" We will join our authors and the characters they create as they debate competing ideologies, struggle with timeless human questions, imagine more equitable ways of organizing society, and explore the ethical and moral concerns at the root of pressing social and political issues. How do Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and our other captivating writers confront the problems of their era and transform them into literary masterpieces that transcend time and place?

For several centuries, Siberia has enjoyed a reputation that is much worse than the place itself. Since the 17th century, Siberia has been the ultimate place of exile for criminals and dissidents. But Siberia is much more than a detention space. For ages Siberia provided an escape for those who found Russia's ruling regimes unbearable. Remote, severe, yet free, Siberia was Russia's Wild East - with plenty of land, no landlords, no serfdom, no censorship, and -often- with no law. The course explores Siberia's histories, myths, and memories - from the Siberia of nomadic tribes and Russian tsars to the Siberia of post-Soviet oil giants.