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Classics of Russian Literature Course Guidebook Topic Literature Subtopic & Language Western Literature Classics of Russian Literature Course Guidebook Professor Irwin Weil Northwestern University PUBLISHED BY: THE GREAT COURSES Corporate Headquarters 4840 Westfields Boulevard, Suite 500 Chantilly, Virginia 20151-2299 Phone: 1-800-832-2412 Fax: 703-378-3819 www.thegreatcourses.com Copyright © The Teaching Company, 2006 Printed in the United States of America This book is in copyright. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of The Teaching Company. Irwin Weil, Ph.D. Professor of Russian and Russian Literature, Northwestern University Irwin Weil is professor of Russian and Russian Literature at Northwestern University, where he has been teaching since 1966. Previously, he taught at Harvard and Brandeis Universities. He was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a family that speaks only Midwestern American English; his father was formerly the owner of the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. At the age of 19, as a student at the University of Chicago, the young Weil encountered the powerful talent of Dostoevsky and decided to learn how to read that literary powerhouse in his native language. When Soviet diplomats laughed at the young American’s desire to enter the USSR in Stalinist days, he settled for learning, reading, and speaking Russian in the United States. Twelve years later, when Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed to open the gates slightly, he made a beeline for Moscow, only to hear from natives that he spoke Russian “too well, like a character from Tolstoy”⎯shades of his reading! Dr. Weil has been going to the USSR (later Russia) for more than 45 years⎯lecturing at Russian universities and academies, talking up a storm with colleagues and friends by the hundreds, if not by the thousands. He knows the Russian language and its culture as well as any person born in the United States. Dr. Weil’s students come to him in groups that number more than 500 every year. He has received dozens of teaching awards from universities and national associations. He is a laureate of the International Pushkin Medal for Outstanding Service to Russian Language and Literature and the possessor of an honorary doctorate from the prestigious St. Petersburg Nevsky Institute for the Humanities. He now speaks six or seven European languages, and he reads biblical Hebrew. Dr. Weil’s written work covers the field of Russian literature and culture, with special attention to the classics of 19th -century Russian literature and the Soviet period. He has done a great deal of work on the relations between Russian literature and music, and neither he nor his students are strangers to musical notes. To this very day, students and colleagues continue to ask him: “So, what are your Russians up to now?” ©2006 The Teaching Company. i Table of Contents Classics of Russian Literature Professor Biography .................................................................................... i Course Scope ............................................................................................... 1 Notes on the Course.................................................................................... 3 Lecture One Origins of Russian Literature............................. 4 Lecture Two The Church and the Folk in Old Kiev................ 8 Lecture Three Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 1799–1837 .... 12 Lecture Four Exile, Rustic Seclusion, and Onegin................ 15 Lecture Five December’s Uprising and Two Poets Meet ..... 19 Lecture Six A Poet Contrasts Talent versus Mediocrity ..... 24 Lecture Seven St. Petersburg Glorified and Death Embraced........................................ 29 Lecture Eight Nikolai Vasil’evich Gogol’, 1809–1852.......... 34 Lecture Nine Russian Grotesque⎯ Overcoats to Dead Souls.................................. 40 Lecture Ten Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821–1881 ....................................................... 45 Lecture Eleven Near Mortality, Prison, and an Underground......................................... 49 Lecture Twelve Second Wife and a Great Crime Novel Begins ..................... 56 Lecture Thirteen Inside the Troubled Mind of a Criminal .......... 61 Lecture Fourteen The Generation of the Karamazovs ................. 66 Lecture Fifteen The Novelistic Presence of Christ and Satan........................................... 72 Lecture Sixteen Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828–1910.............. 77 Lecture Seventeen Tale of Two Cities and a Country Home ......... 83 Lecture Eighteen Family Life Meets Military Life ...................... 89 Lecture Nineteen Vengeance Is Mine, Saith the Lord.................. 95 Lecture Twenty Family Life Makes a Comeback .................... 101 ii ©2006 The Teaching Company. Table of Contents Classics of Russian Literature Lecture Twenty-One Tolstoy the Preacher ...................................... 106 Lecture Twenty-Two Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818–1883 ......... 113 Lecture Twenty-Three The Stresses between Two Generations......... 119 Lecture Twenty-Four Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860–1904 ......... 126 Lecture Twenty-Five M. Gorky (Aleksei M. Peshkov), 1868–1936 ..................................................... 132 Lecture Twenty-Six Literature and Revolution .............................. 138 Lecture Twenty-Seven The Tribune⎯Vladimir Maiakovsky, 1893–1930 ..................................................... 143 Lecture Twenty-Eight The Revolution Makes a U-Turn ................... 149 Lecture Twenty-Nine Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, 1905–1984 ..................................................... 154 Lecture Thirty Revolutions and Civil War............................. 160 Lecture Thirty-One Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, 1895–1958 ..................................................... 166 Lecture Thirty-Two Among the Godless⎯ Religion and Family Life ............................... 171 Lecture Thirty-Three Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1890–1960 ..... 176 Lecture Thirty-Four The Poet In and Beyond Society.................... 181 Lecture Thirty-Five Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Born 1918 ...................................................... 186 Lecture Thirty-Six The Many Colors of Russian Literature......... 192 Timeline ................................................................................................... 200 Glossary ................................................................................................... 209 Biographical Notes.................................................................................. 213 Bibliography............................................................................................ 215 ©2006 The Teaching Company. iii iv ©2006 The Teaching Company. Classics of Russian Literature Scope: Throughout the entire world, Russian culture—and most especially its 19th- century literature—has acquired an enormous reputation. Like the heydays of other culturesthe Golden Age of Athens, the biblical period of the Hebrews, the Renaissance of the Italians, the Elizabethan period in Englandthe century of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, and other great Russian writers seems, to many readers, like a great moral and spiritual compass, pointing the way toward deeper and wider understanding of what some call “the Russian soul,” but many others would call the soul of every human being. How did this culture come about, within the context of a huge continental country, perched on the cusp between European and Asiatic civilizations, taking part in all of them yet not becoming completely subject to or involved in any of them? What were the origins of this culture? How did it grow and exert its influence, first on its neighbors, then on countries and civilizations far from its borders? What influences did it feel from without, and how did it adapt and shape these influences for Russian ends? What were its inner sources of strength and understanding that allowed it to touch—and sometimes to clash with—these other cultures and still come out with something distinctively Russian? What wider implications does this process have for the entire human race? Such are the questions and musings of the mind and the heart that these lectures will attempt to arouse and entertain. No final solutions can possibly be claimed, but some amusement and, perhaps, instruction and enlightenment may well be encountered. Some consideration will be given to the very first predecessors of the contemporary Russians and their so-called “era of Rus’,” which occurred in the Eastern European territory around the ancient city of Kiev. The origin and rise of these predecessors, together with their discovery of Eastern Orthodox Christianitytheir attempt to coalesce and their fatal clash with the eastern Tatar invaders, from the 9th to the 13th centuries A.D.produced two impressive literary languages and documents well worthy of serious study. Subsequent history contributed to a literature that reflected human life and its nature and spirit. That history included the formation of a huge empire, ©2006 The Teaching Company. 1 starting around the city of Moscow in the 14th century and expanding under the rule of a government located in the more recent city of St. Petersburg from the early 18th century. Two cataclysmic 20th-century revolutions,
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