The Russian Novel

The course will focus on three of the greatest philosophical crime novels in modern literature: Gogol’s Dead Souls, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bely’s Peterburg. Together they chart the course of development of the Russian novel, engaging literature’s essential questions, but also its “accursed” ones, as the Russians say—the ones that can never be answered, but provoke the most worthy of sort of debate.