RUSS 117. The Russian Literary Anecdote

This course explores the nature and evolution of the Russian anecdote that originated in ancient times. From Ivan the Terrible through Peter the Great, the anecdote, like other oral genres, persisted in spite of governmental censorship. The heyday of the Russian literary anecdote was the first half of the nineteenth century. We will read anecdotes and stories from chronicles and diaries of contemporaries of the Russian tsars, short stories of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy that were based on real facts and transformed into anecdotes. We come full circle to the chronicles of Soviet and post-Soviet times by Dovlatov and Veller.
Humanities.
2 credits.
Catalog chapter: Modern Languages and Literatures: Russian
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/russian

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