“So far I’ve been reading nothing but Pushkin and am drunk with rapture. I discover something new every day,” Dostoevsky wrote in a letter to his wife. Justly hailed as the founder of modern Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) is for Russians what Shakespeare is for the British, or, as a leading critic sums up, “Pushkin is our everything!” Developing a literary language and an impressive variety of genres, Pushkin provided a powerful stimulus for the unfolding Russian literary tradition. His perfectly crafted works continue to inspire literature, music, theater, and film. This course is devoted to The Little Tragedies, four plays written in 1830 that showcase Pushkin’s exquisite poetics of brevity and the universality of his work: “The Miserly Knight,” “Mozart and Salieri,” “The Stone Guest,” and “Feast During the Plague.” These dramatic gems show how readily all-absorbing human passions can align themselves with destructive self-delusion. Characteristically, Pushkin does not tell us what to think. He leaves us thinking.

Recommended text: Alexander Pushkin, The Little Tragedies. Translated, with Critical Essays, by Nancy K. Anderson. Yale University Press, 2000. (paperback)