Wednesday, January 7, 2009

SS Course 2009: Russia At War: Through the Eyes of its Writers

Course 243
Date: 26–30 January
Time: 6.00 pm
Full Price: R270,00 Staff: R135,00 Reduced: R70,00

Russia at War: Through the Eyes of its Writers
Dr Sara Pienaar, Research Fellow, South African Institute of International Affairs

The experience of war gave birth to some of Russia’s finest literature, including work by Pushkin, Tolstoy and Pasternak, as well as those less known in the West, such as Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail Lermontov and Valery Grossman. Although all were subjected to censorship of some kind, their works remain powerful depictions of human beings under conditions of conflict.


This course will discuss selected works of familiar Russian writers and introduce you to a number of less familiar ones. It will survey some of the wars Russians have fought in the last 250 years, and will focus on the relationship between the writers, their works and the social conditions they describe. The course will not involve close textual analysis. While students are encouraged to read or reread the fiction listed below, the course will not assume full familiarity with the works; not all of them will be discussed in the same detail.

LECTURE TITLES
  1. Historical and literary framework: wars, writers and their contexts.
  2. Rebellion and invasion: the Pugachev Revolt and 1812. (Pushkin’s Captain’s Daughter and Tolstoy’s War and Peace.)
  3. The Caucasus, Crimea and the Chechens. (Lermontov’s Hero of our Times, Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad, The Cossacks and Sevastopol Tales.)
  4. War and Revolution. (Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, Solzhenitsyn’s 1914, Babel’s Red Cavalry, Bulgakov’s White Guard, Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago.)
  5. The Great Patriotic War 1941–45. (Solzhenitsyn’s Incident at Krechetovka Station and Grossman’s Life and Fate.)

Recommended reading
  • The books and stories listed above, in any edition.

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