Course Detail

This course explores the 19^th-21^st-century tradition of Russian and East European science fiction in literature and film — from pre-revolutionary visionaries to early Soviet zealots and skeptics, Space-Age masters, and the post-Soviet aftermath of the present day. The course is organized around the big questions that have driven the genre science fiction since its first inception: What does it mean to build utopia? What new worlds and creatures — and what new ways of being human — could our encounters with alien spaces reveal? How will new technologies transform moral, social, and political norms in everyday life on Earth, and how will they change our ideas about who and what we are? In Russia and East Europe, fictional explorations of these questions evolved alongside a massive real-world experiment in creating utopia and the new human being, in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The course traces this artistic and historical narrative through the work of artists such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Alexander Bogdanov, Evgeny Zamyatin, Karel Čapek, Mikhail Bulgakov, Alexander Belyaev, Ivan Efremov, Abram Tertz, Stanislaw Lem, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Andrei Tarkovsky, and others. As students trace the story these writers’ works tell about the potentials, promises, and dangers of the scientific imagination, they also step outside the Slavic tradition to reflect on literary and historical crossing-points with selected works in English, such as stories by Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and episodes of the contemporary television series Black Mirror. Throughout the course, class discussions and ongoing discussion assignments help students delve into these texts and the foundational questions they raise—both for their own times and places, and for us now.