Great Love in Small Genres: 19th and 20th Centuries

This course will focus on lyric poetry and short stories of great 19th- and 20th-century writers on the theme of love. We will see how these writers treat various aspects of love – psychological, moral, social, and even political. We will examine how this theme is connected with the individual creative characteristics of each writer and thus with the evolution of Russian literature. Prose works under study will include those of Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Leskov, Chekhov, and Bunin; we will also read lyric poetry by Pushkin, Baratynsky, Lermontov, Tiutchev, Fet, Nekrasov, Blok, and Akhmatova. Students will write three short papers and a final exam.