For understanding any country it is the culture of childhood which is particularly significant. This course aims at providing the students with knowledge of the development of children's culture in XX-th century Russia (Pre-Soviet - Soviet - Post-Soviet) with its social values. The course concentrates on problematization of contradictions between ideological conceptions and real practices of education and upbringing in all three periods. Children's literature as a significant part of a Russian culture of socialization encodes the main values of the society - that's why it will be in the centre of the course. Lectures will be supported also by various pieces of evidence from Russian  folklore, periodicals and movies.

Preliminary programme

1. Brief history of childhood conceptions in the Russian history.
2. Children's culture during the Russian "Silver Age".
3. Soviet conceptions of childhood: ideas, slogans, institutions.
4. Soviet youth communist organizations: "Oktyabr'ata" - "Pioneers" - "Young Communist Leage".
5. Children Art in the USSR: directions and institutions.
6. Children's writers in the USSR: servants of regime?   escapists?  secret dissidents?
7. "High Literature for the smallest": key texts.
8. Soviet children's cinema.
9. Everyday life of Soviet children: 1920-1940.
10. Everyday life of Soviet children: 1950-1980.
11. Post-Soviet childhood and Post-Soviet children literature.

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The collapse of the Soviet Union has entailed a radical restructuring of the class system in Russia. Class is a central axis along which power and inequality are organized in society, which makes its analysis highly important. This course investigates the re-formation of class relations in contemporary Russia by approaching it from a variety of disciplinary, theoretical and methodological perspectives. It examines what social class means in Russia, how class relations have transformed historically, and how class intersects with other distinctions, such as gender and ethnicity. The primary focus is on examining the cultural and symbolic production of class, such as lifestyles, hierarchies of taste, habitus, and consumption patterns. The lectures analyse cultural representations of class and the ways in which class order is produced in various symbolic and everyday practices. In addition, class is also examined from a structural angle focusing on questions of redistribution and socio-economic inequalities. The course also critically reviews and problematizes Western theoretical discussions concerning class, in particular the concept of middle class.

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In this course television is treated as a medium that produces images of reality, representations of society as well of the "others", and transmits social norms and values. Studies of TV-texts give means of understanding shifts of cultural identity and trends in collective consciousness in Russia of the 2000s. Television remains important in the system of Russian social and cultural communication. In spite of growth of the Internet users' segment, television is still the most widespread and accessible medium. As a technology and a medium it defines modes of thinking and feeling, proposes ways of communicating on various levels. The culture of new media in Russia is being formed on a base of watching, understanding and criticizing TV.

The main goal of this course is to interpret television programs of different genres in order to reveal characteristic features of the recent Russian culture. It also aims to demonstrate methods of "reading" TV-messages - that is, semiotic analysis of verbal and visual TV-texts, study of narratives, and discourse analysis.

Topics of this course include:

-          constructions of the reality in the news;

-          popularity of infotainment;

-          rhetoric of nation and nationalism in analytical   programs;

-          images of the society in "new Russian" series;

-          representations of gender, age and ethnicity in talk-shows;

-          constructions of subcultures on TV-screen;

-          images of the past in documentaries;

-          trash and  glamour in TV-shows.

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Visual culture makes up a significant part of a particular national culture or civilisation and encodes the main values and attitudes of the people and state. For understanding Russia with her dramatic history this is particularly significant. The course aims at providing the students with knowledge of the Russian visual arts and contemporary visual environment with its semiotics and encoded social values.

Content of the course

Starting from the Russian icon and the 19th century painting, the course concentrates on Russian avant-garde art, the Soviet poster and Soviet/Russian art-photography with special attention to the following topics:

• The Russian avant-garde: in literature and in visual arts;
• The history of the Soviet poster;
• Photography and propaganda;
• Gender in Russian painting, poster and photography;
• Censorship in visual arts under Stalin;
• Famous Russian war photographs and photographers;
• Socialist realism in the visual arts (1950s-1980s);
• The re-emergence of fine-art photography in the 1970s;
• Outstanding contemporary Russian photographers.

The final part of the course deals with the Post-modernist 'visual quotation' in Russian pop-culture.

The course is organized in cooperation with Aleksanteri Institute's Russian and East European Master's School.

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