This course offers a detailed introduction to the prose and verse of Russian Modernism, from its beginnings in the 1890s to its radical reshaping after its encounter with Soviet Power. Key literary movements (Symbolism, Acmeism, Futurism, the new avant-garde of the 1920s) and major ideological and cultural phenomena (“Decadence”; “the new religious consciousness” of the Russian fin de siècle; archaist tendencies in literature, art, and culture; Soviet promotion of “proletarian” culture) are examine