Instructor: R. Stanton
Fulfills Columbia’s Global Core requirement
Rarely is it mentioned that the country we call Russia – a gigantic land mass stretching all the way from Finland to the Sea of Japan – is, even today, not really a “nation” but an “empire,” encompassing more than 170 distinct ethnic groups within its 6,592,800 square miles. For most of the past two centuries, this empire was even larger and more diverse; as the Union of Soviet Soviet Socialist Republics, it spanned 8,649,538 square miles, including several countries that today are independent. While, inside the Soviet Union, this diversity was often celebrated as proof of the “friendship of peoples” underlying the Communist state, the voices, literatures and cultures of the empire’s ethnic and national minorities were selectively silenced even within the USSR, and remain virtually unknown outside its borders.
In this course, we will read fiction and poetry by authors representing Chechen, Circassian, Daghestani, Abkhaz, Bashkir, Tuvan, Chuvash, Chukchi, and other ethnic minorities on the territory of modern Russia, as well as works by writers from former Russian colonies such as Georgia, Armenia, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan; analyze how ethnic, racial, and national identities are constructed in these texts, and why; and learn how the literature of Russia’s minority peoples has shaped – and been shaped by – Empire, Communism, cultural heritage, politics, and the idea of human rights.
