PITC 317 Arts of the Russian Revolution

Division of Liberal Arts

3 credits 45.0 hours
300 level undergraduate course

Artists of the Russian revolution believed that their new society would transcend history and tradition. Proletkult (Proletarian Culture) was a laboratory where artist-engineers tested a culture for the new ‘Soviet Man,’ who would prove the truth of their discoveries. However as revolution turned to repression, artists reverted to traditional - even religious - forms to uphold power or to question it. The filmmaker Eisenstein went from god-bashing to god-building to psycho-analyzing the gods. The painter Malevich used the mathematics of the icon to represent the curvature of spacetime, but Anna Akhmatova used icons of the Holy Mother to claim for poetry the role of spiritual protector of the Russian people. Mikhail Bulgakov’s wildly cinematic novel “The Master and Margarita” was so subversive that it could not be published until forty years after it was written. In it, the devil comes to Stalin’s Moscow to host a party for the damned and to perform the most radical social experiment ever: he tests to see if truth and mercy still live in Soviet Man’s re-engineered soul.

Prerequisites HUMS course

This course is not repeatable for credit.
This course is equated with the following courses: PITC*317, LAPI*938, PITC*316, LAPI*933, PITC*312, LAPI*937, PITC*315, PITC*314, LAPI*936, LAPI*931, PITC*309, LAPI*926, LAPI*929, LAPI*930, LAPI*932, LAPI*935, PITC*305, PITC*307, PITC*308, PITC*310, PITC*313, LAPI*924, PITC*303, LAPI*920, LAPI*928, PITC*301, PITC*306, LAPI*925, PITC*304, LAPI*923, PITC*302, PITC*309, PITC*324, PITC*325, PITC*326