Fantasies of Modern Russian Culture
This interdisciplinary course studies the fascinating world of Modern Russian Culture through the prism of its utopias, science fiction, and fairy tales. Throughout the semester, we will examine how supernatural dreams and revolutionary fantasies merged with social and scientific ideas so as to glorify technological progress, or critique Soviet society. We will thus trace the productive interplay between experimental aesthetics and utopian thinking before the Revolution and the artistic celebration, subversion, or negotiation of politics throughout the Soviet period. The lecture series will explore modernist and futuristic utopias and dystopias in late Imperial Russia and the early Soviet period (Bely, Blok, Scriabin, Stravinsky, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mayakovsky, Protazanov, and Zamiatin); fantastic narratives that intertwine black magic with politics at the height of Stalinism (Bulgakov); post-apocalyptic visions created during the stagnation (Strugatsky and Tarkovsky), and interplanetary voyages that mark the collapse of the USSR (Pelevin). Participants will sample representative works of 20th-century Russian literature, visual art, music, dance, and film, as they reflected the time's dominant representational models: modernism, primitivism, abstraction, socialist realism, and postmodernism.
