HIST 360 - Constructing the Russian Revolutionary Self

FC ARHU CD WADV

4 credits
What role do individuals play in revolutionary history? How do understandings of identity change in moments of upheaval? How do scholars use ‘ego-documents’ as historical sources? This research seminar is an exploration of selfhood in the modern Russian revolutionary tradition. Through treatises, memoirs, artworks, and films, we will examine how nihilists, populists, Marxists, feminists, and the militant working class constructed new forms of radical subjectivity. The seminar will culminate in a research paper that will investigate, through primary sources, both revolutionary biography as well as the challenges that revolution poses to the idea of biography itself.