Russian Fiction Beyond the Canon

Transformations of a literary canon always reflect historical shifts and upheavals. Today, in the context of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine and weaponization of culture as a political tool, the Russian literary canon has been problematized and revised. Through our course we want to offer a broadened version of Russian-language literary culture focusing on those texts of 19th  and 20th  cc. that have often remained outside university curricula overshadowed by the pillars of the canon. The goal of the course is to attract students to works and literary experiments that have not been smoothly incorporated into “the Russian canon” – Soviet, Western, or post-Soviet alike. Along with close readings of these texts, we also want to highlight and practice theoretical approaches to textual analysis that typically are sidelined in literary courses and consider how working with a broader canon challenges our conceptions of literary movements, devices, and genres.