Russian poetry, prose, and literary criticism from the late 1880s until 1940. Topics include: Russia's fin-de-siècle culture in its European context; the main aesthetic and philosophical trends informing the modernist field and the current theoretical problems in the study of the modernist period; the modernist renewal of Russian poetry, including a survey of the period's representative figures and texts; experiments with narrative and genre in the prose of the 1910s to 1930s, in Russia and in emigration; conservative reactions to modernism, from L. Tolstoi to Socialist Realism; the modernist strategies of survival (metanarratives, children's literature, internal and external exile, literature of the absurd). Readings may include: Chekhov, Solov'ev, Bunin, Z. Gippius, Sologub, Rozanov, Annenskii, Blok, Belyi, Kuzmin, Babel', Esenin, Zamiatin, Pasternak, Mandel'shtam, Platonov, Zoshchenko, Tsvetaeva, Kharms, A. Tolstoi, Nabokov, Bulgakov, Khodasevich. Taught in Russian. Readings in Russian and English.