Fantastic Journeys

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Instructor: Jonathan Brent
This course will be taught in English.

This course will investigate the great historical transitions and transformations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Eastern Europe and Russia through the avant garde literature of those lands that may be called the literature of the “fantastic.” Not realism, nor fantasy (e.g., Harry Potter), nor science fiction (e.g., War of the Worlds), the genre of the fantastic that sprang to life throughout this part of the world in Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Ukraine and elsewhere, brought about a radical questioning of experience, “values,” the nature of human consciousness, tradition, language and norms of logic.

We will read about newts and apes turning into proto-men; human beings turning into bugs, while spirits of the dead direct the affairs of the living and infernal machines reflect and perhaps control their consciousness. At a time of growing authoritarianism and nationalism throughout Europe and in the wake of WWI and the Russian Revolution, these works register the seismic upheavals in human consciousness and society as they question absolutes, accepted ideas of logic, temporal sequence, causation, reason, the nature of identity and fundamental questions of truth and morality, as well as the possibility of constructing literary narratives of self and society.

Of special interest to this class will be the Jewish dimension of this literature and the signal role that Jewish thinkers and writers played in its development.

Classes will meet for 2 sessions of 1 ½ hours each for 8 weeks.

Week I: Introduction: WW I, 1917 Revolution, Realism & Reason
Week II: Capek, War With the Newts
Week III: Kafka, The Metamorphosis; a Report to an Academy
Week IV: Mayakovsky, Bedbug
Week V: Olesha, Envy
Week VI: Kharms, The Old Woman
Week VII: An-ski, The Dybbuk
Week VIII: Schulz, Street of Crocodiles

Reading List:

All texts are available through Amazon; many are available as e-books.

The Metamorphosis (Kafka) 1912/1915 (first published)
Report to an Academy (Kafka) 1917 (first published)
The Dybbuk (An-ski) 1916
Envy (Olesha) 1927
The Bedbug (Mayakovsky) 1929
Street of Crocodiles (Schulz) 1934
War With the Newts (Capek) 1936
In Today I Wrote Nothing (Kharms) 1928-1942

Background Reading:

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)
Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936)
Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846)

Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College.