JWST/REST 354AX: Terror, Dissent, Russians, Jews: Literature and Life in 20th-Century Russia

Examines life under tyranny – Soviet and Nazi – as distilled through the fiction of Russian/East European and Jewish writers who experienced it firsthand. An intertwining of political and private life from the inception of a new regime, with many people exuberantly hopeful, through the various stages of acquiescence, resistance, escape, and sometimes death. Readings include Timothy Snyder’s essay On Tyranny, stories, novels, and poems by Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Babel, Vasily Grossman, Kundera, and Nabokov