COM5023/COM6023/RUS5023/RUS6023 - Russian Novel: Self and Society - 2022/23

This course examines the emergence and the development of the Russian novel until 1860. We will focus on novels about the constitution of individual, gender, and collective identity in an environment marked by the influx of ideas and fashions coming from the West while the structure of Russian society remained staunchly committed to an absolutist model of power. Readings from Pushkin, Tolstoy and Pavlova. Themes include nobility and its others, the romantic construction of gender differences, fashion and self-fashioning, the poet and society, Russia and the Caucasus, order and rebellion.