The Stuyvesant High School Online Course Guide

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This semester-long course explores Russian literature from the height of the Tsars in the middle of the nineteenth century to collapse of the Soviet Union near the end of the twentieth century - from Fyodor Dostoyevsky to Victor Pelevin and Gary Shteyngart. The last 150 years of Russian (and Soviet) history have been extremely complex, full of political, social, technological, and cultural revolutions and retrenchments, and the literature we will read reflects this complexity. We will focus on questions of individualism and identity in relation to society and powerful social structures like the Church, the Tsars, and the Communist Party. Of course, we do not read literature simply to understand history: this period of Russian literature includes some of the most moving and entertaining books around - where else will you read about a disembodied nose that is also a Tsarist bureaucratic whiz?

Readings will include novels, plays, short stories, and poems by such authors as Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Gogol, Akhmatova, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, and Tolstoy. Students will complete a variety of analytical and creative writing projects.