Modernism in Eastern Europe

What makes modernism in Eastern Europe distinctive from its Western counterpart? Is the national form of modernism even possible? How did modernist poets, prose writers, and filmmakers from the former Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires respond to the turbulent events of the first half of the 20th century? This course explore these questions through close readings of works by the prominent Eastern European and Russian writers (Mykhail Semenko, Pavlo Tychyna, Jaroslav Hasek, Stanislaw Witkiewicz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Andrei Platonov, Yuri Olesha, Mikhail Bulgakov), visual artists (Kazimir Malevych, Oleksandr Bohomazov, Mykhailo Boychuk), and cinematographers (Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein). We will examine aesthetic theories and concepts, such as defamiliarization, skaz, siujet, dialogism, drawing on literary theory that emerged from the literary debates of the 1920s (e.g., Shklovsky, Tynianov, Eikhenbaum, Bakhtin). All texts will be assigned in English.