Russian and Soviet Culture and History: Russian literary classics today from BBC to Russian online media, 5 cr

This course familiarises students with Russian literary classics and discusses their contemporary reception. What is there in the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Turgenev that speaks to wide audiences in Russia and abroad? What universal, human values do they address? Which political and social problems relevant to contemporary word do they discuss? What does their fictional world look like from the viewpoint of national, gender, and ethnic identities as understood today? The course materials include original literary texts (in English translation if needed) as well as recent Russian and foreign TV and film adaptations of Russian classics.

Lecture I OVERVIEW OF RUSSIAN LITERARY CLASSICS

Lecture II POST-SOVIET FILM AND TV ADAPTATIONS OF ICONIC RUSSIAN NOVELS I: REPRODUCING NATIONAL IDENTITY

(Gogol's Dead Souls and Taras Bulba)

Lecture III POST-SOVIET FILM AND TV ADAPTATIONS OF ICONIC RUSSIAN NOVELS II:

WHAT CAN DOSTOEVSKY TEACH US AGAIN?

(Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot)

Lecture IV POST-SOVIET FILM AND TV ADAPTATIONS OF ICONIC RUSSIAN NOVELS III:

ON LOVE AND GENDER ROLES

(Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago)

Lecture V RUSSIAN CLASSICS FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF POPULAR GEOPOLITICS

Lecture VI HOW MANY TIMES CAN ONE MAKE A FILM OF ANNA KARENINA? Joe Wright’s 2012 film with Keira Knightley