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Read the Classics: Russian Literature

Join "the Great Conversation" of the literary imagination by participating in a four-part reading, lecture and discussion series focused on literature of Russia. Lena Lencek, Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, will give short lectures providing background and then will lead the discussions.

At Gresham Library

Selected Sundays in October, December, February and April, 2–4 p.m.

The titles for the Russian Literature series

A limited supply of these titles will become available at the preceding book discussion.

Registration is required for each session; register online (select the link after each title below), in the library or by calling 503.988.5387.

The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol · October 19, 2008 · past
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov · ~~December 14, 2008~~ rescheduled to January 25, 2009, due to snow · past
The Little Tragedies by Alexander Pushkin · February 8, 2009 · past
Russian Poetry of the Silver Age by Annesky, Blok, Tsvetayeva, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, etc. Includes a bilingual poetry reading · April 26, 2009 · register online starting 1/25/09

Printable Read the Classics: Russian Literature flyer (pdf)

Meet your professor

Lena Lencek, Reed College Lena M. Lencek, Professor of Russian and Humanities at Reed College, specializes in Russian poetry of the Silver Age, the Russian romantics, and has a particular affinity for the works of Mikhail Bulgakov. She has written and lectured on a wide variety of subjects, both academic and popular, and to date, has published nine books.

Overview

This series presents an excursion through the main forms of classical Russian literature — the short story, the novel, drama, and lyrical poetry — by way of 19th and 20th century masterpieces by authors who have shaped the sensibility and cultural identity of every cultivated Russian. Yet, Pushkin, Gogol, Bulgakov, and the poets of the Silver Age transcend the Russian condition. They have their fingers on the pulse of every soul: though filled with the "sound and the fury" of their land and their time, they tap into the same humanistic values that feed the Western tradition, yet offer idiosyncratic perspectives on the universal themes and accursed questions that are the common preoccupation of our humanity.

Gogol (1809–1852)

Our focus for the discussion will be on the short stories in The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, specifically two from the St. Petersburg cycle ("The Nose" and "The Overcoat") and two from Mirgorod ("Old World Landowners" and "The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich").

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol, the brilliant Romantic author of Dead Souls and the comedy The Inspector–General, was a master of irony and of grotesque and sublime effects, whose humor horrifies and whose horror amuses. D.S. Mirsky has famously described the world of Gogol's texts as "one of the most marvelous, unexpected — in the strictest sense, original — worlds ever created by an artist of words." Unpredictable and unclassifiable, his works admit wildly divergent interpretations. Contemporaries read him as providing bold critique of tsarist conditions; the 20th century appreciates him for his verbal virtuosity and insights into the crisis of identity.

Bulgakov (1891–1940)

Mikhail Afanasevich Bulgakov launched his career writing plays for the Moscow Art Theater and a series of novels and stories that culminated in the The Master and Margarita. This eccentric text, is one of the most inventive, captivating, and provocative novels of the 20th century. It was 12 years in the writing. Finally published in 1966, it was written at the height of the Stalin Terror. The novel interweaves at least four plot lines: a comic account of Satan's visit to Stalin's Moscow; a love story between a tormented writer and a brave woman; an artist's tale; and an alternative history of Christ's encounter with Pontius Pilate.

Master and Margarita website Biography of Bulgakov, maps, themes, characters, information on the chapters, and bibliography.

Pushkin (1799–1837)

We will be reading and discussing Pushkin's Little Tragedies (The Covetous Knight, Mozart and Salieri, A Stone Guest, A Feast in the Time of the Plague). It is a cycle of "chamber" plays which were written, along with The Tales of Belkin, during the prolific Boldino autumn of 1830. They explore universal themes: rumor and reputation, time and prudence, religion and the fear of death, and ideal and profane love.

Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, Russia's greatest poet, launched all the major forms of modern Russian literature and laid the foundation for the Russian literary language. Bridging European literature and Russian experience, he authored such breakthrough works as Eugene Onegin, Boris Godunov, The Queen of Spades — each with own operatic shadow — as well as historical novels and critical prose.

The Pushkin Web Page has a brief biography and material of interest.

Russian Poetry of the Silver Age

Russian Poetry of the Silver Age There will be a poetry reading in Russian and English as well as a discussion of the poems that are in an anthology that you can pick up at the Gresham Library.

The poets of Russia's Silver Age — experimental, erudite, exuberant, and staggeringly talented — were born in the last two decades of the 19th century. Swept up in the turmoil of the Revolution, Civil War, and Communism, they made up the group that Roman Jakobson eulogized in his 1930 essay "On a Generation That Squandered Its Poets." Six representatives will be the focus of our discussion: Blok, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Mayakovsky.

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Blok (1880–1922) exemplifies the poetry of the Russian symbolists just before the Revolution of 1917. Filled with anxious anticipation of a new world order, Blok's three volumes of poetry are at once deeply autobiographical and historical, serving as a subtle portrait of his troubled generation.
The Acmeist Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (1889–1966) rendered love in all its nuances and variations, speaking through a lyrical voice enriched with allusions and tributes to her extended "family" of fellow poets.
The author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak (1890–1960) came to poetry from a firm European grounding in music, art, philosophy, and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. His first volume of verse, My Sister Life, set a pattern for virtuosity that in the course of a difficult career marked by tense relations with Stalin's regime, remained true in the range of literary forms, including translation, in which he exercised his talents.
Osip Emelievich Mandelstam (1891–1938), arguably the greatest, most complex of the Silver Age poets, invests all hopes for salvaging the culture of humanism from the wreckage of 19th century Russia, in the regenerative power of art and especially the poetic word.
With her wrenching rhythms and elided speech, the tragic poet Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva (1892–1941) chronicles the varieties of loss: of lover, child, city, country, and ultimately, self.
The titanic persona of Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930), Futurist poet, seemed the very embodiment of revolution. His abrupt, dynamic rhythms and non-traditional themes betray a talent set on breaking with the past and forging a new language and a new poetics of the future. Brash, iconoclastic, and irresistibly irreverent, he moves from a hauntingly autobiographic mode to the oratory of demagoguery. Listen to rare recordings of Mayakovsky reciting his poetry at The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing.