The Other Russia: Freedom and Resistance in the Arts

SLAVIC 189 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

A free-wheeling literary, theater, cinema, arts, and journalism scene flourished after the USSR collapsed, but Russia’s war in Ukraine and intensified authoritarianism have transformed the cultural scene into something more fragmented and harder to grasp. Our course will seek out and study remarkably divergent and bold material from the chaotic 1990s to the polarized present by writers, poets, filmmakers, and artists living abroad and in Russia.
Russian culture’s long history of creative resistance and dissident thought has inspired contemporary forms of freedom. We will ask how cultural activists have found their voices and used them effectively in the stories, poems, plays, movies, videos, memoirs, and documentaries.

We will read works set within Russia’s borders, in former Soviet republics, and in sites of emigration and self-exile. What has diaspora come to mean, and how have cultural figures in far-flung places created a sense of shared identity? Themes of historical trauma and reconciliation, of religious renewal (Orthodoxy, Islam, and Judaism), of sexual expression and sexual freedom, and of feminist and LGBTQ resistance will be explored, as will responses to the brutality of the Russia-Ukraine and Chechen wars.
Writings by Svetlana Aleksievich, Keti Chukhrov, Egana Djabbarova, Elena Fanailova, Alisa Ganieva, M. Gessen, Elena Gremina, Boris Khersonsky, Vladimir Sorokin, Maria Stepanova, Oksana Vasyakina, and others. Films include Leviathan, Four, Alexandra, My Joy, Mr. Nobody Against Putin, and Beslan, Remember; art by Masha Trebukhina, Ekaterina Galaktionova, Stanislav Lvovsky, and Linor Goralik.

Notes: All readings in English, with added section for those able to read in Russian.

Course Notes

All readings in English, with added section for those able to read in Russian.