OLLI0069 - The Era of the Russian Revolution: History and Literature 1890s-1930s

Course Description

We are living today through a period of profound societal transformation. This six-week on-line course considers another such period of human history, the era of the Russian Revolution. It uses a combination of lectures, Zoom lecture and discussion, and your reading of one of the great Russian language novels of the 20th century, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago [Doctor Zhivago (Vintage International, 2011) [Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)]. The course examines the decades that encompass the 1917 Revolution, and Zhivago’s lifetime—from the gilded age of the 1890s through the First World War, the collapse of Romanov autocracy, the rise of Bolshevik authoritarianism and civil war that convulsed the land mass of Eurasia, to the new communist state that came to rule northern Eurasia. Using history and literature, we will experiment in a laboratory of head-spinning opportunities to consider how humans respond to the challenge of change. Watch video