1917 and the Russian Literature | Basic Program Lecture

Chicago

SILVER WITH RED: 1917 AND THE RUSSIAN LITERATURE
If literature is a mirror of life, then the revolution of 1917 could be seen as a hammer that broke that mirror into multiple pieces. Some writers chose exile, others stayed. Of those who stayed, some believed in the party line and complied with it; others didn’t. Some works were published in a million hardcover copies; others were read in typewritten “samizdat” copies or kept “in the drawer” for decades. This lecture explores the impact of 1917 on Russian authorship and readership: What did it mean to be Akhmatova, Mandelstam or Tsvetaeva under Stalin? How did the situation of Bulgakov or Pasternak differ from that of Gorky or Sholokhov? How did Bunin and Nabokov or, later, Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, fare abroad? And what does it mean to be a reader of these writers — then and today?

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