English and Comparative Literature
Undergraduate and Graduate Seminar
M 4:10-6PM
Literature and film provide critical reflections on how nuclear technology and its dangers have shaped Soviet and post-Soviet imaginations and worldviews. This course draws from multiple literary and creative narratives that respond to the region’s nuclear history, tracing how official discourse was first subverted by dissident narratives, and then, over the course of the Perestroika period (1985–1991), subsumed within them. Alongside disasters like Chernobyl, we will investigate nuclear legacies across the former Soviet sphere, including in Kazakhstan, where the Soviet government detonated more than 450 nuclear tests over a forty-year period, and in Lithuania, where inhabitants of a former “nuclear city” still live as if beyond history’s reach. How did artistic narratives shape Soviet nuclear realities, and vice versa? How have nuclear concerns fostered cultural exchange and solidarity in unexpected ways? These questions will guide our inquiry.
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