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RUSSIAN 450 001 WN 2021
St Petersburg is one of the most mythologized cities in the world, with a rich legacy of intriguing cultural incarnations, expressive of its paradoxical status as: (for two hundred years) the capital of an empire that it did not resemble, either in its un-Russian design or its evident modernity; a city of magnificence and grandeur on its main streets, with squalor and poverty in its side streets; an embodiment of western-European “reason” and the Enlightenment, in which the demonic reigns and madness is an ever-present risk; a city where the wealthy and powerful live in luxury, while the alienated, solitary resident is likely to be crushed. This course will examine, chapter-by-chapter and week-by-week, Andrei Belyi’s outstanding novel Petersburg, which many readers nowadays place beside the modernist masterpieces of Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Faulkner. In parallel with Belyi’s novel, other literary and cultural statements of the city’s paradoxical nature will be examined – including some of the most famous Petersburg works of Pushkin, Gogol’, Dostoevskii, Blok, Mandelstam, Brodsky, and others. Guest lecturers – including some joining the class from the city itself -- will look at other aspects of St Petersburg culture, among them -- issues of race and identity in twentieth-century treatments of the twentieth-century city.