English 370: The Russian Novel
The 19th century Russian novel is said to be the golden age of Russian literature in making some of the greatest contributions to the humanities. The two finest representatives of this period are the writers Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. With their effortless characterizations of human involvements, and their introduction of psychology into novels, these writers have been enormously influential now into the 21st century.
Dr. Russell Weaver
has taught English 370: The Russian Novel
for over 20 years, and continues to find new meanings and insights in his
analysis of the text with students. In the Spring of 2014 his course will
investigate Tolstoy’s War and Peace
and Dostoevsky’s Brothers Kamazov.
Dr. Weaver recently
talked about his course: “One
of the nicest things anyone ever said about the course was an older woman who
took the course about the third time I offered it. She said she felt like we
were reading the Bible. We would read a passage and simply talk about it as
deeply as we could. Talking about the text's words in this way puts us into
intimate contact with the text in a powerful way. However, even when we talk
about the text in this way as thoroughly as we can, it is still the case that
these texts always exceed our ability to understand them. This is not because
it is difficult to understand the words. Except for a few passages in Karamazov, these novels are actually
not difficult to read. The difficulty they pose is simply the difficulty of
understanding any living thing, the difficulty of understanding what Melville
calls in Moby-Dick "the
ungraspable phantom of life."
“These texts discuss historical,
social, religious and philosophical ideas not in the abstract but as on-going
concerns of the characters. This means that we get to think about not only the
psychological and emotional issues that arise the characters' lives, but we
also get to think about their lives in the larger context provided by these
powerful ideas.”
If you have
interests in the antinomies of human and divine justice, if you are interested
in how religious questions play out against the psychology of poverty and
humiliation, or if you just like reading some of the coolest books ever, with a
professor known for his line-by-line, and even word-by-word analysis, look for
Dr. Russell Weaver’s course this spring.
