This semester, Dr. Alexander Spektor, assistant professors of Russian, began teaching a new course: 20th Century Russian Culture – The Soviet Experiment (RUSS 2050). In this course, students examine aspects of high culture (literature, art, architecture, and classical music) and as well as aspects of low, or popular, culture (film, popular music, and other aspects of daily life). These topics are studied within the framework of the historical and political development of the period. To accentuate this theme of modern Russian culture, Dr. Spektor invited several guest speakers to give presentations on relevant subjects. The first was Dr. Stuart Goldberg (Georgia Tech), who delivered a talk entitled, “Your Mistress or Mine: Briusov, Blok, and the Boundaries of Poetic ‘Propriety,’” which depicted the poetic rivalry between the two major poets of the Silver Age: Valery Briusov and Aleksandr Blok. The second guest speaker was David Haas from the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at UGA. Dr. Haas led a discussion about Russian avant-garde music. In addition to in-class speakers, Dr. Spektor also hosted relevant-themed discussions in the Miller Learning Center. These after-class events were open to the public. The first of these lecturers, Yuri Savel’ev of Moscow, spoke about Stalinist architecture. Later in the semester, historian Nikolay Koposov (Emory) gave a lecture about the period of the Great Terror in Stalin’s Russia – also known as the Purges. From poetry to architecture, these guest speakers helped to engage students in the central themes surrounding the course, and in doing so, gave them a deeper understanding of the development of modern day Russian culture. The Russian faculty also welcomed Laura Olson Osterman (U. Colorado, Boulder) for a talk about the Pomaks of Bulgaria, and the revival of pre-socialist wedding traditions amongst Bulgarian Muslims.
