In instituting the remarkable changes in the Soviet Union that occurred under glasnost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev famously referred to the two decades that immediately preceded his becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party as the “era of stagnation.” While that may have been true in terms of the country’s politics and its economy, the literary world - like the arts in general - nonetheless saw a number of memorable works appear.

In this course we will discuss novels by three of the era’s finest authors, each of whom bore witness to the malaise and discontent that, in retrospect, helped prepare the way for the country’s sudden demise. Notably, despite the pervasive censorship, all but one of the works that we will be reading were published within the Soviet Union.

We will begin with Sergei Dovlatov’s quasi-autobiographical The Zone, on his service as a prison camp guard in the 1960s. That will be followed by Farewell to Matyora, in which Valentin Rasputin (no relation to that other Rasputin) shows modern progress destroying village life in Siberia, and the course will conclude with a pair of short novels by Yuri Trifonov, who, perhaps more tellingly than any other writer of his generation, depicted the spiritual emptiness and moral compromises that characterized his time.