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• 1 2020-11-30T12:28:54-05:00 About 58 image_header 2020-12-21T19:45:52-05:00 This Scalar book features the work of students in Professor José Vergara’s course RUSS014 The 20th-Century Russian Novel: Revolution, Terror, Resistance (Fall 2020) at Swarthmore College and provides resources on various major writers.
  
  THE PROJECT
  As part of our efforts to understand the Russian Novel’s significance across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, students in RUSS014 collectively built this website using Scalar. They practiced different skills and writing styles to complete four scaffolded writing assignments: an author biography (encyclopedic), annotations (editorial), an analysis of a short story or essay OR a close reading (literary criticism), and an essay (public writing/criticism).
  
  Biography
  Each author's biography provides the following information: dates (birth, death, other significant ones), life sketch with key events and moments of interest, a general summary of work, information on involvement in or opposition to movements or groups, and other useful details. 
  
  Annotations
  It may be tempting to view annotations as strictly “factual” definitions and descriptions. However, annotations, while offering context (historical, political, biographical, etc.), are also analytical and intended to clearly illuminate the connections between complex ideas, themes, metaphors, and symbols. An annotation can explicate the significance of its referent to the novel, both as a whole and on a particular page. It might highlight the presence of a repeated motif. Annotations, in short, are subjective, interpretive, and dependent on what the editor (student) chose to highlight in each case. The annotation pages also provide links within and between novels.
  
  Annotations are keyed to the following editions:
  • Aitmatov, Chingiz. The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years. Trans. F. J. French. Indiana University Press, 1988.
  • Chukovskaya, Lydia. Sofia Petrovna. Trans. Aline Werth. Northwestern University Press, 1994. 
  • Kuzmin, Mikhail. Wings. Trans. Hugh Aplin. Hesperus Press, 2007. 
  • Nabokov, Vladimir. Invitation to a Beheading. Trans. Dmitri Nabokov. Vintage, 1989.
  • Olesha, Yury. Envy. Trans. Marian Schwartz. New York Review of Books, 2004.
  • Sokolov, Sasha. Between Dog and Wolf. Trans. Alexander Boguslawski. Columbia UP, 2016.
  • Ulitskaya, Ludmila. Sonechka. In Sonechka and Other Stories. Translated by Arch Tait. Edited by Natasha Perova. Moscow: Glas, 1988. 7-98.
  • Vodolazkin, Eugene. The Aviator. Trans. Lisa C. Hayden. Oneworld, 2019. 
  Analysis
  The analysis pages offer close readings of key sections in the novels, as well as critical readings of short stories and essays by the same authors. 
  
  Essay
  The essays featured here provide a mix of approaches. Some are more analytical, closer to the literary criticism of the Short Story/Essay Analysis section. Others skew toward thought pieces that explain the significance of a novel within its own context (a particular point in time in Russia or Kazakhstan) or its significance to our own time and place. 
  
  THE COURSE
  What does a culture look like after it undergoes a series of revolutions—sexual, linguistic, political, artistic—in short succession? To answer this question, RUSS014 surveyed the Russian novel of the long twentieth century. During this tumultuous era, authors continued the tradition begun by Alexander Pushkin, the father of Russian literature, of using the word as a forceful means of resistance. An integral part of the formation of Russia’s national identity as it grew more prominent in world affairs, the continued evolution of its novelistic tradition is one of the best means to understand the character of this epoch, as well as present-day conditions in Russia. We examined the selected works in terms of their cultural, social, and historical contexts and highlighted such issues as revolution, repression, trauma, forms of resistance, the New Soviet Wo/man and building projects, centers/peripheries, the artist’s role in society, Russia’s relationship to the West, historical legacies, and Russia’s national identity.
  
  We began with Mikhail Kuzmin’s Wings, Russia’s first queer novel and the subject of much controversy for its modernist techniques and subject matter. Next came Yury Olesha’s Envy, which details the effects of the October Revolution and the changes it led to in social and familial relations. Written in a matter of weeks, Vladimir Nabokov’s furious Invitation to a Beheading offers a dystopian take on totalitarian power and an exploration of the fear of death, while Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna and Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, a poetic cycle that uses novelistic structure, document the experience of Stalin’s purges and mass arrests. We also read a chapter from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, a so-called “experiment in literary investigation,” that offers a rejoinder to Akhmatova. Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years took us from the capitals to provide a view of the Soviet periphery in Kazakhstan. Sasha Sokolov’s Between Dog and Wolf, which has been called the Russian Finnegans Wake, remained untranslated for 30 years, and we unpacked its complex structure and language together. To understand the end of the Soviet era, we read Liudmila Ulitskaya’s novella Sonechka. Finally, Evgeny Vodolazkin’s time-traveling Aviator served as the apotheosis of the 20th-century Russian novel, as it brings together many of the themes, devices, and ideas that lie at the heart of this survey.
  
  
  CONTRIBUTORS
  • Hannah Bartoshesky '21 is an Engineering major and Philosophy minor.
  • Faith Becker '21 is a Peace and Conflict Studies and Economics double major. She loves learning about other countries and their cultures and plans to continue these studies at a graduate level.
  • Richard Chen '21 is a Computer Science and Economics major. He loves reading and learning about other cultures and traditions, hoping someday to travel the world. However, on any given day, his favorite place would perhaps be reading or writing in a small, quaint coffee shop, where he drinks coffee and gets lost in the world of books (and work!).
  • Tyler Hicks '23 is a Comparative Literature student from San Diego, CA with an emphasis in Spanish and Russian literatures. They are an avid fan of Tolstoy, Nabokov, and García Lorca.
  • Sara Laine '21 is a double major in Peace & Conflict Studies and Global Political Economy from West Orange, NJ.
  • Ariel M. Overdorff '21 is an Astrophysics major and Computer Science minor.
  • Rose '24 likes reading books. They have a cat, two goats, several chickens, many bees, and a dog (though no wolf!)
  • Samuel Sheppard '21 is from London, United Kingdom. He is a Computer Science and Astrophysics double major hoping to some day work in data science. He has a passion for reading fictional works and is an appreciator of thoughtful world-building. As a native of Britain, naturally his other passion is soccer. His career as a young adult includes working as a bartender before moving on to chemical treatment in metal manufacturing when the COVID-19 pandemic endangered his job in the service industry.
  • Rachel Sinex '22 is an honors major in Psychology with a double major in Peace and Conflict Studies.
  • Anwyn Urquhart '23
  • Veronica Yabloko '22 is a Comparative Literature major studying Russian and English literature in both the original language and translation. Some of her favorite authors include Nabokov, Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and she hopes to study Nabokov more closely in the future.
  
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  Special thanks to Roberto Vargas, Research Librarian for Humanities & Interdisciplinary Studies