Slavic Civilizations (255-0-1)

Topic

The Apocalypse: End Times in Russian Literature an

Instructors

Bradley Huber Underwood

Meeting Info

Locy Hall 109: Tues, Thurs 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

Since at least the time of Ivan the Terrible, Russians have demonstrated a distinct obsession with the end of history, not just to understand and predict such an end, but to live in it, either by preventing or hastening its disclosure. Similarly for many Russian writers and philosophers, the apocalypse has been a point of orientation as much as disorientation. The end of time acts as conceptual deadline, and therefore as a stimulus to moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical reflection and clarity. It forces one to see one's ideas to their conclusion, to confront contradictions and tensions that are easy to ignore amid the commotion of life. These contrasts include: good and evil, life and death, immorality and morality, truth and falsehood, faith and nihilism, fear and love, God and human, Christ and Antichrist, God and Devil. The apocalypse may make such dialectics inescapable, but parsing them will remain ever more paradoxical and fascinating.

Focusing on Russian literature but with crucial forays into philosophical and religious thought, this course surveys how Russian creative writers and thinkers have invoked the paradoxes and narratives of the apocalypse to formulate a redemptive image of the world and of the human being, even as their stories and essays will readily admit that the impulse towards "redemption" can be highjacked for the purposes of evil at an individual and at a national level. The final part of the course will consider the resurgence of interest in the apocalypse and the Antichrist both in Russia and the West, especially the reception and influence of Russian apocalypticism on the West.

In this course, we will read novels and short-stories by authors such as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Mikhail Bakhtin, and, most recently, by Eugene Vodolazkin. We will also read philosophical essays by thinkers such as Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdiaev, and Sergei Bulgakov.

Class Attributes

Literature and Arts Foundational Discipline
SoC Humanities and Fine Arts Distro
SoC Individual and Social Behavior Distro