CLRS UN

“Truth is stranger than fiction,” wrote Mark Twain in 1897. It is an axiom more relevant today than ever before, as more and more writers draw on “true events” for their literary works. Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, goes so far as to insist that “there are no borders between fact and fabrication, one flows into the other” in contemporary literature. In this course we read works from Russian and American literature that dance along this line between fact and fiction. Sometimes called “creative non-fiction,” “literary journalism,” or “documentary prose,” these works (Sergei Tretiakov, Viktor Shklovsky, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, John McPhee, Artem Borovik, and others) blur the boundaries between documentary evidence and literary art. No prerequisites.

Subject

CLRS UN

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Catalog

2026-2027 Bulletin

Source

bulletin.columbia.edu

In her 1975 essay The Laughter of Medusa, Hélène Cixous compared women’s writing—in French, “écriture féminine”—to the unexplored African continent. To date, literary criticism has been grappling with the distinct qualities of literary works, crafted by women. This course offers a survey of main autofictional works and memoirs, written originally in the Russian language within the last 100 years. We will start our journey with the tumults of the WW1 and the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, through the WW2, the Soviet dissident movement, the emigration waves into Israel and the United States, the advent of a post-socialist Russia in 1991—in order to arrive at the two plus decades of Vladimir Putin’s presidency. We will consider the ways in which each author transposes and conveys her own—and others’ memories—through the medium of autofiction, defined by Serge Doubrovsky, who coined the term in French, as “the adventure of the language, outside of wisdom and the syntax of the novel.” All selected works, with very few exceptions, are available in English; no reading knowledge of Russian is required. No prerequisites

Subject

CLRS UN

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Catalog

2026-2027 Bulletin

Source

bulletin.columbia.edu

Over the past decade, official Russian rhetoric has posed queerness as the product of cultural and moral degradation in Western countries, framing Russia’s domestic legal homophobia and revanchist foreign policy as heroic resistance to a deformed and despotic Western sociopolitical order. According to this narrative, queer identity is a recent and unwelcome Western import to Russia, something fundamentally alien to Russianness. Our course draws together a wide array of cultural artifacts, accrued from the 19th-century up to now, which tell a starkly different story. A story of lives that defied expectation—and of the pains and pleasures that such defiance entailed. There is heroism in this story, but its ‘heroes’ often don’t fit the moniker, flouting our expectations much as they did those of their contemporaries. Spanning three centuries, and media of every kind, we will work to uncover the history of gender and sexual difference that the present Russian regime seeks to obscure and erase. What were these lives, and who were these people? How did they understand themselves, and how can we understand them today? What did they endure, what were their joys, and what did they create? In attempting to answer these questions, we will trace the cultural roots of Russia’s present-day anti-queer ideology, and consider the structures of power that have shaped its national identity. Existing scholarship will provide us with context for our readings, while critical tools drawn from feminist philosophy and queer theory help us to deepen our reflections. There are no prerequisites for this course. No knowledge of Russian is required

Subject

CLRS UN

Credits (min)

3

Credits (max)

3

Credit unit

points

Type

course

Edition

2026-2027

Catalog

2026-2027 Bulletin

Source

bulletin.columbia.edu