Thank you (Soviet civilization and text recommendations

[Nicole Monnier]

Dear SEELANGStsy!

Many thanks to ALL who gave me suggestions for my 11th hour/15th week and
otherwise last minute text selection for my Soviet civilization course. I
ended up going with a couple stories selected from the fabulous GLAS series
of translated texts (one is a story on army hazing, the other, a Pelevin
story about foreigner-husband hunting among WWII dead). As a number of
people requested I pass along suggestions from others, here is a summary:

TEXTS:
Essays by Brodsky, Tatiana Tolstaya
Viktor Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line
Viktor Pelevin stories that "illustrate the late-20c cataclysm in a symbolic
way": "The Life and Adventures of Shed Number XII" and "Vera Pavlovna's
Ninth Dream." (I'll add here the text I chose: Pelevin's "The Tambourine for
the Upper World" - we'd done a lot of reading on Soviet women, and it seemed
a fun text upon which to end the semester.)
Solzhenitsyn's Harvard speech

FILMS:
Okno v Parizh
Barkenbardy
Burnt by the Sun (as it happens, I showed this earlier in the semester in
connection with the purges)
Prisoner of the Mountains
Barber of Siberia (my correspondent especially recommended it for my
uninterested business majors!)

OTHER VISUAL MATERIALS/LINKS

The Kremlin website (my correspondent recommended having students
compare/contrast with images of American White House):
http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/

A list of all the GLAS offerings: http://www.russianpress.com/glas/list.html

Two photo series from the Washington Post called "The Russian Chronicles":
1995: http://www.f8.com/FP/Russia/index.html and for 2005:
http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/russianchronicles/

Material from the Iowa International Writing Program:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~iwp/index.html. (from my correspondent: " I just
looked for the past couple of years to see who's there: Lev
Usyskin, Mikhail Butov, Kseniya Golubovich, Natalya Vorozhbit,
Yekaterina Sadur, Aleksandr Ulanov, Sabit Madaliev, Maxim Kurochkin, and
more. The samples are fairly short and accessible. They often offer
perspectives on post-Soviet transitions.")

A recent NPR program entitled "The Resurgence of Russia":
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7734529

Finally, if it's possible that there are others out there who haven't
stumbled across the EXCELLENT site, "Seventeen Moments in Soviet History."
an NEH funded project directed by James von Geldern and Lewis Siegelbaum, I
highly recommend it. With its wealth of historical summaries, primary texts,
visual and audio material (there's online video and sound recordings), it's
more or less an online Soviet civilization course - and one, that I might
add, embarrassed the heck out of me when I found it with three weeks
remaining in my own course.

   http://www.soviethistory.org/index.php


Thank you again to all my respondents!

In gratitude,

Nicole


****************************
Dr. Nicole Monnier
Assistant Professor of Instruction
Director of Undergraduate Studies (Russian)
German & Russian Studies
415 GCB
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211

phone: 573.882.3370

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