Survey of Russian Literature

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Survey of Russian Literature

• From Modernism to the Present

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Announcements

• Web Page http//russian.arizona.edu/rsss405
• Listserv
• News Andrei Voznesenskii

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Note on Transliteration

• Check out PDF of Shaws book
• Library of Congress system http//polyglot.lss.wi
  sc.edu/slavic/information/Lib-Cong-Translit.htm

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Note on Versification

• Binary meters iambic, trochai
• Ternary meters dactylic, amphibrachic, anapestic

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Films this week

• Pudovkins Mother (1926)
• Based on Maksim Gorkys novel

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Maxim Gorky 1868-1936

• Aleksei Peshkov (real name)
• Political activist, short story writer, novelist,
  playwright
• Short stories about tramps
• Novel, The Mother
• Adviser to Stalin Socialist Realism

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Vsevolod Pudovkin 1893-1953
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The Mother

• The other film about 1905 Gorkys novel
• Zarkhi, Golovnya, Doller, and MAT
• Mass scenes ice-breaking on the Volga technical
  virtuosity
• Montage, emotion, the personal, symbols

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Cultural Periods

• Realism 1850s-90s
• Neo-Realism and Modernism 1890s-1920s
• Socialist Realism 1930s-1980s

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Pudovkins The Mother

• Film qualities
• Socialist Realism
• Ordinary workers and peasants
• Accessibility
• Guiding hand of the CP
• Collective (not individual)
• Optimism
• Reality in its revolutionary development
• Narodnost, partiinost, ideinost, klassovost

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Neo-Realists Pushkin-Tolstoy Tradition

• Chekhov
• Gorky
• Bunin

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Realism (and Neo-Realism)

• Details of everyday life
• Emphasis on ordinary
• Political edge
• Stylistic directness

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Style Continuum

• Sentence simplicity vs. complexity
• Denotative vs connotative
• One meaning vs. many (ambiguity)
• Subtle vs obvious devices
• Ordinary vs. extraordinary/unusual events,
  psychologies, dialogues
• Descriptive vs. ornamental (images, metaphors)

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More on style

• Less familiar, but easily understandable, lexicon
  calls attention to itself
• Bizarre images, names, words (neologisms) stand
  out
• Musicality also an ornamental feature

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Who is who?

• Pushkin simple, direct language
• Gogol convoluted, bizarre

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Modernists Gogol-Dostoevsky Tradition

• Prose and poetry
• Sologub
• Merezhkovsky
• Belyi

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Modernist poets

• Many of interest
• Our focus
• Blok
• Akhmatova
• Mandelshtam
• Pasternak
• Esenin
• Mayakovsky

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Alexander Blok (1880-1921)
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Akhmatova (1889-1966)
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Modernism 1890s-1920s

• Experimentation symbolism
• All the arts synthesism
• Neo-Romantic individualism
• Dualisms (transcendentalism, Manicheanism,
  dream-reality issues)
• Art as religion
• Cosmopolitanism

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Modernism examples

• World of Art Diaghilev
• Dance Ballets russes, Nijinsky, Pavlova

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Examples in Music and Painting

• Stravinsky
• Painting Malevich, Goncharova, Kandinsky,
  Chagall
• Literature Blok, Akhmatova, Mayakovsky

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Sologub 1863-1927

• Poetry, short stories, novels
• Decadence-Symbolism
• Pessimism

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Bunin 1870-1953

• First Russian to win Nobel prize for literature
• Light breathing
• Emigration to Europe

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Alexander III 1881-1894

• conservative
• Pobedonostsev
• Trans-Siberian railroad
• Industrial development
• Famine and disease in 1890s
• Succession of Nicholas II

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Nicholas II 1894-1917
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Character

• Tutored by Pobednostsev
• Conservative, family man limited education
• Unpopular wife (German) Alexandra
• Unprepared for leadership

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Events (I)

• Coronation
• Economic problems agriculture and industry
• Political activity
• Liberals and conservatives
• Radical parties Social Democrats and Socialist
  Revolutionaries

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Social Democrats

• Party of Lenin
• Marxism Economics
• Materialism, Determinism
• Importance of proletariat
• Split in 1903 Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

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Socialist Revolutionaries

• Populist heritage
• Importance of peasants

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Other Forces

• Liberal Parties
• Black One Hundred

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Events (II)

• War with Japan 1904-05
• Revolution of 1905
• Strikes, demonstrations, mutinies
• Resolved violence, concessions (Duma, censorship)

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Final years of Nicholas II

• Social unrest assassinations, strikes
• World War I (1914-1918)
• Rasputin
• First revolution of 1917 (February)
• Provisional government-Kerensky
• October Revolution

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Vladimir Lenin (Ulyanov, 1870-1924)

• Social Democrat Led Bolsheviks
• Led coup in October (November) 1917
• Hero of Soviet State body in Mausoleum on Red
  Square

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Visiting the Mausoleum
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Getting Rid of Filth
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Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)

• Theoretician
• Commissar for War 1918-25
• Ousted by Stalin
• Assassinated in Mexico

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Periods of Soviet History

• War Communism, 1917-21
• NEP, 1921-28
• Building Socialism (Five-Year Plans), 1928-41
• World War II and Zhdanovism, 1941-53
• Thaws, 1953-64
• Stagnation, 1964-85
• Glasnost and Perestroika, 1985-91

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Leaders

• Lenin ( Trotsky)
• Stalin
• Khrushchev
• Brezhnev
• Andropov
• Chernenko
• Gorbachev

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War Communism (1917-21)

• Civil War Whites and Reds War with Poland
• Literature and culture
• Blok Babel
• Modernism continues
• Solzhenitsyn, Sholokhov, Pasternak
• Red Wheel, Quiet Flows the Don, Dr. Zhivago

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War Communism (1917-21)

• Civil War Whites and Reds War with Poland
• Literature and culture
• Blok Babel
• Modernism continues
• Depictions of the period
• Solzhenitsyn, Red Wheel,
• Sholokhov, Quiet Flows the Don
• Pasternak Dr. Zhivago

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Post-Revolution Developments

• Socialist Revolutionaries opposition eliminated
• Shift of capital from Petrograd to Moscow
• NEP
• Formation of Soviet Union, December 1922

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NEP 1921-28

• New Economic Policy limited capitalism
• The New State and the Arts Hands Off!
• Fellow-Travelers (Trotskys term)
• Babel, Zamyatin, Zoshchenko and numerous others
  modernism continues

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NEP 1921-28

• New Economic Policy limited capitalism
• The New State and the Arts Hands Off!
• Fellow-Travelers (Trotskys term)
• Babel, Zamyatin, Zoshchenko and numerous others
  modernism continues

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Babel (1894-1941) First Goose, First Fee,
Odessa stories
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Zamyatin (1884-1937) The Cave
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Zoshchenko (1895-1958) Bees and People
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End of NEP, Beginning of Stalinism

• First Five-Year Plan, 1928-32
• No more tolerance of Poputchiki (Fellow-Travelers)

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Lenin to Stalin

• Death in 1924
• Succession of Stalin
• theology student
• Dzhugashvili (Georgian)
• years of political activity, arrests, exile
• Beginnings of new policies elimination of rivals
• First Five-year Plan (1928)