Introduction and Overview of Russian History around 1900 · Research seminar + specialised knowledge - Lent Term: student-led presentations on your chosen topic to engage with the sub-topic more deeply · Moodle: preliminary sources and reading list Secondary literature is not obligatory but highly recommended to contextualise the source material Start reading early - nearly 1400 pages of primary material! o Take notes whilst reading - What is important? What strikes you? What is strange about it? . Seeley: Special subjection section of the library !! · Read materials for discussion in advance of classes . Aim of the classes: to take attention away from the Russian Revolution; think counterfactually Fin de siècle . End of the 19th century . Why has the term become so potent and why is associated with the end of the 19th century? o It's French o But the century came to end everywhere . Theatre play: Fin de siècle published in France - death with murder, insanity, corruption - encapsulated the feeling of the actual fin de siècle Already feels like the end of the world - apocalyptic feelings in contemporary society - very much associated with the end of empires (German, Russian etc.) Certainties and securities not there anymore · Change > New beginnings Fin de siecle is a watershed, not an end of a period - a transition where two periods link - contemporaries had the perception of time periods coming together/ the impression of change Most vividly expressed in arts and culture - indicative that the term fin de siècle comes from a theatre play - theatre is a place where reality is mirrored, recreated, distorted, reflected, crooked mirror! A laboratory of society - things are discussed here before they hit the radar of the rest of society . Superbly captures the feelings, anxieties, aesthetics of the time - Robert Musil, 'The Man Without Qualities' (a short chapter) " The notion that people then felt · Expresses a certain of uneasiness about the linear progress of time - Time moving forward? Backward? Standing still? Slowing down? Speeding up? . Questions at the heart of fin de siècle World views, philosophies, and conventions were revised Development of modernism (understanding that not every fact can be collated) - a reaction and critique to c.19th positivism (everything has an
objective truth) which everyone believed in (not just scholars or artists), collated, learned the FACTS Tolstoy - realist writer of the c.20th and was obsessed with the cognition of objective reality - to present the socio-intellectual truth of human life fl to change and improve society · Concerned with social, human issues Realist art had a social purpose to show reality and then criticise it " Just a stylistic device - entrapment that you think it's real, existence but in fact it is fiction (even history! Contrived to select material and write a STORY) · Fact and fiction come together in these stories o There is no direct link between subject and object - anti-positivist