| Unit name | ‘Hedgehogs and Foxes’: The Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel 2019 |
|---|---|
| Unit code | RUSS20013 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Dr. Chitnis |
| Open unit status | Open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Russian |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
In this unit, students will study five of the best-known classic Russian novels, by writers including Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. They will explore the social, intellectual and artistic contexts that inform the works, while focusing particularly on analysis of the key themes and artistic approaches in each novel. Students will also trace through the works the development in Russian literature of certain key ideas, including the superfluous man, the portrayal of women, ideas of love, freedom, heroism, truth, justice and redemption, the purpose of literature, and the idea of Russia past, present and future.
Students will acquire a thorough understanding of the key themes and preoccupations of major works by some of Russia and the world’s most distinctive and influential novelists. They will be able to analyse these novels in the contemporaneous social, intellectual and artistic contexts of Russia and Europe, and understand their place in the subsequent development of Russian and world literature. Through the detailed knowledge acquired about how the novel developed in Russia, they will also gain a more general understanding of how the novel form might be defined, constructed and deconstructed.
1 x weekly lecture, 1 x weekly seminar (split group)
2000-word essay (50%) plus 2-hour exam (50%)
Lermontov – A Hero of Our Time Gogol – Dead Souls Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment Tolstoy – Anna Karenina Richard Freeborn, The Rise of the Russian Novel, London, 1973. Malcolm V. Jones et al. (eds), The Cambridge Companion to the Classic Russian Novel, Cambridge, 1998.
