A survey of artistic and intellectual life in the USSR from the post-Stalinist “Thaw” period to the collapse of the Soviet empire and its cultural aftermath in the 1990s. Topics include: the recovery of suppressed cultural memory; the fluid boundaries between official and unofficial cultures; internal and external exile; Aesopian language; alternative modes of creation and dissemination (samizdat, tamizdat, unauthorized exhibitions and concerts, etc.); Russian conceptualism and post-modernism. Taught in English, readings in English. Russian originals will be read in conjunction with their rewritings in new contexts including in Ireland, India, South Africa, Japan, Turkey, Canada, Argentina. Taught in English, all readings in English.
A survey of artistic and intellectual life in the USSR from the post-Stalinist “Thaw” period to the collapse of the Soviet empire and its cultural aftermath in the 1990s. Topics include: the recovery of suppressed cultural memory; the fluid boundaries between official and unofficial cultures; internal and external exile; Aesopian language; alternative modes of creation and dissemination (samizdat, tamizdat, unauthorized exhibitions and concerts, etc.); Russian conceptualism and post-modernism. Taught in English, readings in English. Russian originals will be read in conjunction with their rewritings in new contexts including in Ireland, India, South Africa, Japan, Turkey, Canada, Argentina. Taught in English, all readings in English.
