Sibelan Forrester
Kohlberg 340
tel. 610-328-8162
E-mail sforres1@swarthmore.edu
Home Page: https://forrester.domains.swarthmore.edu/>

Office Hours, Fall 2018:
Tuesday, 10:00-11:00
Wednesday, 4:00-5:00
Thursday, 1:00-2:00
...or by appointment

From pre-Christian folklore based in forest, steppe and tundra to today’s Neo-Pagans, Russian culture has been close to nature, developing sustainable agricultural practices, honoring “Moist Mother Earth,” heading from city residences to summer in the ancestral village, visiting favorite secret spots to gather berries and mushrooms. Industrial development was slow in the pre-Revolutionary period, and in many ways the majority peasant population continued the traditional way of life. After 1917, Soviet policy planned to redesign whole landscapes, make rivers flow backwards, and even change the nature of plant genetics. In practice, projects like these oppressed convict laborers and local populations, shrank the Aral Sea, and led to massive pollution and the worst nuclear disaster in human history. Writers in Russia have both supported industrial transformation and resisted industrialization. This traces the evolution of these elements of Russian culture, focusing on expressions of ideology in literature.

No knowledge of Russian is necessary; students with Russian language skills may choose to do some reading in the original.

Course Goals:

1. To learn abut the environment and environmental history of Russia's huge land mass, and how they are reflected in Russian literature and culture
2. To pursue one area of interest through more focused research to a final paper and presentation
3. To practice writing about the intersections of science, technology and nature with folklore, literature and other forms of cultural production.

This web version of the syllabus will be updated throughout the semester as necessary; please bookmark it and consider it the authoritative source.

Fall 2018 Accommodations Statement
If you believe you need accommodations for a disability or a chronic medical condition, please contact Student Disability Services (Parrish 113W, 123W) or email studentdisabilityservices@swarthmore.edu to arrange an appointment to discuss your needs. As appropriate, the office will issue students with documented disabilities a formal Accommodations Letter. Since accommodations require early planning and are not retroactive, please contact Student Disability Services as soon as possible. For details about the accommodations process, visit the Student Disability Services Website at www.swarthmore.edu/academic-advising-support/welcome-to-student-disability-services. You are also welcome to contact me (SF) privately to discuss your academic needs. However, all disability-related accommodations must be arranged through Student Disability Services.

To Buy in the Bookstore or Otherwise Acquire:

1. Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter's Album (NB: This has been translated under a number of similar titles; I chose the one that looked least expensive while still of good quality.)
2. John Scott, Behind the Urals
3. Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows
4. Valentin Rasputin, Farewell to Matyora
5. Fazil Iskander, The Goatibex Constellation
6. Julia Voznesenskaya, The Star Chernobyl
7. Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo

Other readings will be provided on Moodle.

Assignments:

1. Class Blog: post about 500 words each week of comments or questions about the reading, after the first week. This is a good place to float ideas for paper topics. A link to the course blog is at the top of the Moodle page for this course; let me know if you have any trouble with it.
2. First, short paper is due October 2. 5 pages on reflections of the environment in one of the works we have read.
3. A one-hour, take-home midterm examination, self-scheduled, due by 9 p.m on October 11.
4. Second, longer paper, due November 20: 10 pages examining how one work we have read presents issues of environmental degradation, protection or restoration.
5. At some point during the semester: a 10- or 15-minute oral presentation based on one of the background reading sources. Pick something related to your final project!
6. Final project: composing or editing a page on Wikipedia, or more than one page (total added verbiage: 3000 words). You may choose to work on an issue from the list below (or a similar issue selected after consultation with the professor), or to add environmentally relevant information to an article on an important writer or scientist, or on a place or topic. This will require further reading as well as compiling information from our class texts. Let the professor know your initial topic(s) by October 11. We will start the Wikipedia “course” right after fall break (they walk you through what you need to know to do the work properly, with the nice side effect that after this you’ll be a confident Wikipedia editor and participant). Have your topic preliminarily decided by the week after fall break. Be ready to speak about it in class December 11; the final page must be completed no later than December 22.

Potential Final Project Topics:

1. Traditional agricultural and forest “trade” practices (hunting, fishing, woodcutting) and their relationship to the environment; traditions of sustainability in fragile ecosystems
2. Russian Orthodox religion and the human presence (nature-loving saints; monastery properties; the ecology of the Solovki islands)
3. >Peasantry into proletariat: Marxist and Bolshevik theories and their implications for people’s relationship with the earth
4. Peasant writers as distinct voices about the earth (Poets: Kol'tsov; Kliuev; Esenin; Village Prose writers: Abramov, Belov, Rasputin, Soloukhin, Solzhenitsyn; post-Soviet prose about the village)
5. Sakhalin then and now – starting with Anton Chekhov’s book Sakhalin Island and Bruce Grant’s In the Soviet House of Culture
6. The GULag environment over time; humans in extreme conditions, mining the GULag
7. Vavilov versus Lysenko and the (unproductive but very influential) ideologization of botany
8. Trashing the neighbors: industrial projects in the non-Russian former Soviet republics, or exporting Soviet-style industry to socialist Eastern Europe
9. Lake Baikal
10. The Aral Sea
11. The Soviet space program, or the Russian space program today
12. Use value versus prestige: industrial production and the Socialist-era consumer
13. The closed city: academic and technical silos; Irina Grekova’s At the Tests
14. Post-Soviet clean-up (or not)
15. The Baltic Sea, or the Black Sea, or the White Sea
16. Protected land in Russia today
17. The Far East
18. The Russian Arctic
19. Native peoples and the environment
20. Protected species and poachers in Russia today
21. Nuclear power and the environment
22. The impact of climate change in Russia and steps government officials or private individuals are taking – or not.
23. If you read Russian: the treatment of nature in “close range” science fiction of the 1940s and early 1950s (Aleksandr Petrovich Kazantsev, Vladimir Ivanovich Nemtsov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich Studitskii)
24. The connections of environmental activism with political dissidence

• Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Translated by Keith Gessen. Picador, 2006.
• Andrews, James T. and Asif A. Siddiqi. Into the Cosmos: Space Exploration and Soviet Culture. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
• Auer, Matthew R., ed. Restoring Cursed Earth: Appraising Environmental Policy Reforms in Eastern Europe and Russia. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2005.
• Bailes, Kendall E. Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origin of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. E-book in Tripod.
• Benton, Ted, ed. The Greening of Marxism. Guilford Press, 1996.
• Billington, James. The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, "The Forest" (pp. 16-26). Vintage, 1970.
• Bitov, Andrei. "Life in Windy Weather."
• Bitov, Andrei. The Monkey Link. Trans. by Susan Brownsberger. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
• Bolotova, Alla. "Colonization of Nature in the Soviet Union. State Ideology, Public Discourse, and the Experience of Geologists." Historical Social Research, Vol. 29, 2004, No. 3, 104-123.
• Bonhomme, Brian. Forests, Peasants, and Revolutionaries: Forest Conservation and Organization in Soviet Russia, 1917-1929. Boulder and New York: East European Monographs, 2005.
• Bonhomme, Brian. Russian Exploration, from Siberia to Space: A History. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 2012. (E-book in Tripod)
• Brain, Stephen. Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905-1953. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011.
• Bruno, Andy. The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History. Cambridge UP, 2016.
• Bunin, Ivan. "Antonov Apples."
• Chekhov, Anton. "The Steppe."
• Clowes, Edith W. Russia on the Edge: Imagined Geographies and Post-Soviet Identity. Cornell UP, 2011.
• Conquest, Robert. Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. London and New York: Oxford UP, 1986.
• Costlow, Jane. Heart-Pine Russia: Walking and Writing the Nineteenth-Century Forest. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2013.
• Costlow, Jane, and Amy Nelson, eds. Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
• Cracraft, James and Daniel Rowland, eds. Architectures of Russian Identity, 1500 to the Present. Cornell UP, 2003. (Mark Bassin, "The Greening of Utopia: Nature, Social Vision, and Landscape Art in Stalinist Russia," pp. 150-171.)
• Dent, David. Soil asWorld Heritage. (On Tripod as an e-book.)
• Dronin, Nikolai and E. G. Bellinger. Climate Dependence and Food Problems in Russia, 1990-1990: The Interaction of Climate and Agricultural Policy and Their Effect on Food. Central European University Press, 2006.
• Ely, Christopher David. This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity in Imperial Russia. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002.
• Evans, Alfred B., Laura Henry and Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom, eds. Russian Civil Society: A Critical Assessment. M.E. Sharpe, 2005.
• Feshbach, Murray and Alfred Friendly, Jr. Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under Siege. Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins, 1992.
• Fisher Raymond Henry. The Russian Fur Trade, 1550-1700. Literary Licensing, LLC, 2011. (E-book in Tripod.)
• Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford University Press, 1994.
• Gerovitch, Vyacheslav and Anton Struchkov, “Epilogue: Russian Reflections,” in Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 25, No. 3 (Fall 1992), pp. 487-495.
• Gibson, James R. Feeding the Russian Fur Trade: Provisionment of the Okhotsk Seaboard and the Kamchatka Peninsula, 1639-1858. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
• Gladkov, Fedor. Cement. A. S. Arthur and C. Ashleigh, translators. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1994.
• Graham, Loren. The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
• Graham, Loren. Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History. Cambridge UP, 1994.
• Grossman, Vasily. Everything Flows. Introduction by Robert Chandler, Translated by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anna Aslanyan. New York, NY: New York Review Books, 2009.
• Hellberg-Hirn, Elena. Soil and Soul: The Symbolic Word of Russianness. Aldershot, England, Brookfield, VT, etc.: Ashgate, 1998.
• Henry, Laura A. Red to Green: Environmental Activism in Post-Soviet Russia. Cornell UP, 2010.
• Hoch, Steven. Serfdom and Social Control in Russia: Petrovskoe, a Village in Tambov. U of Chicago Press, 1986.
• Iskander, Fazil. The Goatibex Constellation. Translated by Helen Burlingame. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1975.
• Ivanits, Linda. Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY and London: M. E. Sharpe, 1989.
• Josephson, Paul, Nicolai Dronin, Ruben Mnatsakanian, and Aleh Cherp. An Environmental History of Russia. Cambridge UP, 2013.
• Josephson, Paul. Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World. Island Press, 2002.
• Josephson, Paul. Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. U of California Press, 1991.
• Josephson, Paul. Totalitarian Science and Technology. Humanity Books, 2nd ed., 2005.
• Josephson, Paul. Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917-1989. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.
• Kazakov, Iurii. “Goblins.”
• Kim, Anatoly. The Russian Forest. Translation by , published in Soviet Literature, pp. -106.
• Kojevnikov, Alexei. Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. World Scientific Publishing Company, 2004.
• Korolenko, Vladimir. "Svetloyar: In a Wild and Holy Place," translated by Jane Costlow, in The Russia Reader, eds. Adele Barker and Bruce Grant. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 222-236.
• Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1995. (E-book in Tripod)
• Kotkin, Stephen. Steeltown, USSR: Soviet Society in the Gorbachev Era. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1991.
• Kotsonis, Yanni. Making Peasants Backward: Agricultural Cooperative and the Agrarian Question in Russia, 1861-1914. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
• Криничная, Неонила Артемовна. Лесные наваждения. Мифологические рассказы и поверья о духе-«хозяине» леса. Петрозаводск, 1993.
• Leonov, Aleksei. "Kondyr," translated by Kathleen Parthé, in Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 129-139. (Followed by "Appendix II. 'Kondyr': A Parametric Analysis," pp, 140-148.)
• Lovell, Stephen. Summerfolk: A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000. Cornell University Press, 2003.
• Luxemberg, Rosa. The Industrial Development of Poland. Trans. from the German by Tessa DeCarlo, intro by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr. (!). New York: Campaigner Publications, Inc., 1977.
• Martin, Janet. Treasure of the Land of Darkness: The Fur Trade and Its Significance for Medieval Russia. Cambridge UP, 2004.
• Maurer, Eva, Julia Richers, Monica Ruthers, and Carmen Scheide, eds. Soviet Space Culture: Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. (E-book in Tripod.)
• McFadden, David and Claire Gorfinkel, with an overview by Sergei Nikitin, Constructive Spirit: Quakers in Revolutionary Russia. Pasadena, CA: Intentional Productions, 2004.
• Medvedev, Grigori. The Truth about Chernobyl. Basic Books, 1991.
• Moon, David. The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700-1914. Oxford University Press, 2013.
• Moon, David. The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made. London, New York: Longman, 1999.
• Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory (chapter 6).
• Nagibin, Yuri. "The Last Hunt."
• Newlin, Thomas. The Voice in the Garden: Andrei Bolotov and the Anxieties of Russian Pastoral, 1738-1833. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2001.
• O'Connor, James. Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism. Guilford Press, 1997.
• Parrott, Bruce. Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.
• Parthé, Kathleen. Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992. (Also in Tripod as an e-book.)
• Paxson, Margaret. Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2005.
• Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime. (Chapter 1, "The Environment and Its Consequences") Simon and Schuster, 1974.
• Platonov, Andrei. "Among Animals and Plants" (1936), in Soul. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others. New York: New York Review Books, 2008, pp. 155-183.
• Platonov, Andrei. "Electricity."
• Platonov, Andrei. Happy Moscow. Introduction by Robert Chandler; trans. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others. New York: New York Review Books, 2012.
• Platonov, Andrei. "Motherland of Electricity."
• Platonov, Andrei. Soul. Translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and others. New York: New York Review Books, 2008
• Platonov, Andrei. from The Sun, the Moon, and the Ether Channel. In Worlds Apart: An Anthology of Russian Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. and commentary by Alexander Levitsky. Woodstock and New York: The Overlook Press, 2007, pp. 584-615.
• Plokhy, Serhii. Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. Basic Books, 2018.
• Pollock, Ethan. Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
• Robbins, Richard G. Famine in Russia: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis. New York: Columbia UP, 1975.
• Roli-Hansen, Nils. The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science. Humanity Books, 2004.
• Rytkheu, Yuri. A Dream in Polar Fog. Translated by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse. Archipelago Books, 2005.
• Sakharov, Andrei. Memoirs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
• Scott, James. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed. Yale UP, 1999. Chapter 6: "Soviet Collectivization, Capitalist Dreams," pp. 193 – 222.
• Scott, John. Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel. Indiana UP, 1989.
• Semyonova-Tian-Shanskaya, Olga. Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia. Indiana UP, 1993,
• Shalamov, Kolyma Tales. Translated by John Glad. London: Penguin Books, 1994.
• Shukshin, Vasily. Stories from a Siberian Village. Northern Illinois UP, 1996.
• Smith, Hedrick. The New Russians. Random, 1997.
• Smith, Hedrick. The Russians. Crown, 1976.
• Soloukhin, Vladimir. "Stepanida's Funeral" and other stories
• Thomson, Peter. Sacred Sea: A Journey to Lake Baikal. Oxford UP, 2007.
• Todes, Daniel. Darwin without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. London and New York: Oxford UP, 1989.
• Tolstaya, Tatiana. They Sat on the Golden Porch.
• Turgenev, Ivan. Sketches from a Hunter's Album. Translated with intro and notes by Richard Freeborn. London: Penguin Books, 1990.
• Ulitskaya, Ludmila. Medea and Her Children. Translated by Arch Tait. New York: Schocken Books, 2002.
• Viola, Lynne. Peasant Rebels Under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
• Viola, Lynne. The War Against the Peasantry, 1927-1930. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. (also in Tripod as an e-book.)
• Voznesenskaya, Iiulia. The Star Chernobyl. Translated by Alan Myers. London: Quartet Books, 1987.
• Vucinich, Alexander. Science in Russian Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1963.
• Weiner, Douglas. A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999. (Also in Tripod as an e-book.)
• Weiner, Douglas. Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.
• Zinovieva-Annibal, Lydia. The Tragic Menagerie. Translated by Jane Costlow. Evantson, IL: Northwestern UP, 1999.

GENERAL SOURCES:

• Buell, Frederick. From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century. Routledge, 2004.
• Buell, Laurence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagination. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2005.
• Buell, Frederick. Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture and the Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2001.
• Richards, John F. The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2006. (E-book in Tripod)

Week 1: September 4

• Introduction: the geography and climate of Russia
• Geography and climate of Russia
• Video: Radioactive Wolves

September 6

• The environment in Russian area studies

Readings for September 6: excerpt from The Primary Chronicle; excerpt from Linda Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief; excerpts from Neonila Krinichnaya, Forest Delusions (all on Moodle)
(Background reading: Richard Pipes, “The Environment and Its Consequences,” from Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime, pp. 1-24, on Moodle.)

Week 2: September 11

• Aristocrats, peasants, and the landscape

Readings for Sepetmber 11: Ivan Turgenev, Sketches from a Hunter's Album (bookstore): "Khor and Kalynich" (pp. 15-28), "Yermolay and the Miller's Wife" (29-41), "Farmer Ovsyannikov" (70-87), "Bezhin Lea" (99-120), "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands" (121-140), "Loner" (173-181), "Death" (217-230), "Meeting" (265-274), "Living Relic" (354-367), "Forest and Steppe" (383-390)

September 13

• More on aristocrats and peasants

Readings for September 13: dLeo Tolstoy, excerpts from Anna Karenina (Part I, Chapters XXVI and XXVII, and Part II, Chapters XII and XIII; Turgenev, "A Journey to Polesje," pp. 308-325; Jane Costlow, "Walking into the Woodland with Turgenev," from Costlow, Heart-Pine Russia, pp. 17-39, all on Moodle
(Background readings: Olga Semynova Tian-Shanskaya, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, chapters 8-9, pp. 117-156, on Moodle.)

Weeb 3: September 18

• Soviet Industrial Transformations

Readings for September 18: Fedor Gladkov, excerpt from Cement, pp. 12-18 (on Moodle); John Scott, Behind the Urals (bookstore)

September 20

• Science-fictional plans for industrial development

Readings for September 20: Paul Josephson et al., “From Geographic Determinism to Political and Economic Factors,” in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 1-22; Andrei Platonov, from The Sun, the Moon, and the Ether Channel, pp. 584-615; Valentin Kataev, excerpts from Time, Forward!, pp. 42-48, 72-75, 84-49, 93-98, all on Moodle
Background reading: Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization)

Week 4: September 25

• Famines

Reading for September 25: Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows (bookstore); Vladimir Korolenko, excerpt from In a Hungry Year (on Moodle); excerpt from The Primary Chronicle (on Moodle)

September 27
Readings for Septeber 27: Josephson et al., "From Imperial to Socialist Nature Preservation: Environmental Protection and Resource Development in the Russian Empire," in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 23-70.
Background readings: Richard G. Robbins Jr., Famine in Russia 1891-1892: The Imperial Government Responds to a Crisis; Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization)

Week 5: October 2

• Nature, Industry, and the GULag

Readings for October 2: Anton Chekhov, excerpt from Sakhalin Island, pp. 128-136 (on Moodle); Varlam Shalamov, selections from Kolyma Tales (on Moodle)

October 4

• Convict labor, etc.

Readings for October 4: Excerpts from Gorky, ed., Belomor, pp. 17-23, 59-64, 73-87, 289-297; excerpts from Evgeniia Ginzburg, Within the Whirlwind; excerpts from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULag Archipelago, all on Moodle
Background readings: Josephson et al., "Stalinism: Creating the Socialist Industrial, Urban, and Agricultural Environment," in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 71-135; Galina M. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, ed. by Donald Raleigh, trans. by Carol Flath)

Week 6: October 9

• The Village Prose Response

Readings for October 9: Valentin Rasputin, Farewell to Matyora (bookstore); Aleksei Leonov, "Kondyr" (on Moodle)
Background readings: Kathleen Parthé, "'Kondyr': A Parametric Analysis," from Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past, pp. 140-148 (on Moodle); Paul Josephson et al., "The Khrushchev Reforms, Environmental Politics, and the Awakening of Environmentalism, 1953-1964," in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 136-183

October 11
Readings for October 11: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "Matryona's Yard"; Vladimir Soloukhin, "Stepanida's Funeral," all on Moodle. Background reading: Kathleen R. Parthé, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past)

Week 7: October 23

• Morality and the land

Readings for October 23: Leo Tolstoy, "How Much land Does a Man Need?" (on Moodle); Nikolai Zlatovratskii, "The Happy Peasant's Dream" (excerpt from the novel Foundations, on Moodle)
Background Readings: Henri Troyat, Daily Life in Russia Under the Last Tsar; Anton Chekhov, Sakhalin Island; Olga Semyonova Tian-Shanskaia, Village Life in Late Tsarist Russia, ed. David Ransel)

October 25: NO CLASS (professor is away at a conference) Work on your second paper and [ursue the Wikipedia "course."

Week 8: October 30

• Trashing a planet for the sake of Physics research

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Far Rainbow (on Moodle)
Background readings: Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars; Anindita Banerjee, We Modern People: Science Fiction and the Making of Russian Modernity; James T. Andrews, Red Cosmos: K. E. Tsiolkovskii, Grandfather of Soviet Rocketry; Asif A. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857-1957

November 1
Reading for November 1`: Ethan Pollock, excerpt from Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (on Moodle)

Week 9: November 6

• Messing with the Science; Vavilov versus Lysenko

Fazil' Iskander, The Goatibex Constellation (purchase)
Background readings: Josephson et al., “Developed Socialism, Environmental Degradation, and the Time of Economic ‘Stagnation,’ 1964-1985,” in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 184-253; Andrei Bitov, The Monkey Link; Peter Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Scientists; Roli-Hansen, Nils.The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science; David Dent, Soil as World Heritage

November 8

• Check out these sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov
https://phys.org/news/2017-01-russia-vavilov-guardian-world-lost.html

Week 10: November 13

• Chernobyl

Svetlana Alexievich, excerpts from Voices from Chernobyl (on Moodle)
Background readings: Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, trans. by Keith Gessen; Grigorii Medvedev, The Truth About Chernobyl; Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth, trans. by Michèle Kahn and Julia Sallabank, foreword by John Gofman, Intro. by David R. Marpes

November 15
Reading for November 15: Iuliia Voznesenskaya, The Star Chernobyl (purchase)

Week 11: November 20

• Ethnography of the contemporary village

Margaret Paxson, Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village (bookstore); Vasily Shukshin, "Wolves" and excerpts from From the Childhood Years of Ivan Popov, from Stories from a Siberian Village, pp. 127-133, 228-235 (on Moodle)
Background readings: Josephson et al., "Gorbachev’s Reforms, Glasnost, and Econationalism," in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 254-286; Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise

November 22: THANKSGIVING

Week 12: November 27

• Zapovedniki

Readings for November 27: Vyacheslav Gerovich and Anton Struchkov, "Epilogue: Russian Reflections," 9 pp.; Lydia Zinovieva-Annibal, "Wolves," from The Tragic Menagerie, pp. 20-37; Anatoly Kim, excerpts from Father Forest, all on Moodle
Background readings: Josephson et al., "Conclusion: After the Breakup of the Soviet Union: Inheriting the Environmental Legacy," in An Environmental History of Russia, pp. 287-320; Leonid Leonov, The Russian Forest: A Novel; Feliks Shtilmark, History of the Russian Zapovedniks 1895-1995

November 29
Reading for November 29; Excerpts from Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise, on Moodle

Week 13: December 4

• Neo-Pagans and the Mystical Soil

Readings for December 4: Vladimir Korolenko, "Svetloyar: In a Wild and Holy Place," translated by Jane Costlow, pp. 222-236; Elena Hellberg-Hirn, "Mother Russia: Soil and Soul," from Hellbirg-Hirn, Soil and Soul: The Symbolic World of Russianness, pp. 111-135; Poems by Velimir Khlebnikov and Nikolai Kliuev (all on Moodle)
Background readings: Michael D. Gordin, The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe; Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine

Brief presentations of your final projects.

December 6: NO CLASS (professor away at a conference). Work on your WIkipedia assignment; read ahead ofr next Tuesday.

December 11 - last class!

Readingfor December 11: Excerpts from Anby Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History (on Moodle)

Brief presentations of your final projects.

The final Wikipedia work is due by 5:00 p.m. on DECEMBER 22. If you choose to edit an existing page or pages, copy and save the original text from online to submit with your additions. Whether you are editing or creating work, save the result in a file to submit to me. I’ll also check Wikipedia to see what happens, but things could be edited and changed before I get there.