Includes biography of author, index, and bibliographical references.

"Throughout the entire world, Russian culture - and most especially its 19th-century literature - has acquired an enormous reputation. Like the heydays of other cultures - the Golden Age of Athens, the biblical period of the Hebrews, the Renaissance of the Italians, the Elizabethan period in England - the century of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and other great Russian writers seems, to many readers, like a great moral spiritual compass, pointing the way toward deeper and wider understanding of what some call "the Russian soul", but many others would call the soul of every human being.
How did this culture come about, within the context of a huge continental country, perched on the cusp between European and Asiatic civilizations, taking part in all of them yet not becoming completely subject to or involved in any of them? What were the origins of this culture? How did it grow and exert its influence, first on its neighbors, then on countries and civilizations far from its borders? What influences did it feel from without, and how did it adapt and shape these influences for Russian ends? What were its inner sources of strength and understanding that allowed it to tough - and sometimes to clash with - these other cultures and still come out with something distinctively Russian? What wider implications does this process have for the entire human race?
Such as the questions and musings of the mind and the heart that these lectures will attempt to arouse and entertain. No final solutions can possibly be claimed, but some amusement and, perhaps, instruction and enlightenment may well be encountered.
Some consideration will be given to the very first predecessors of the contemporary Russians and their so-called "era of Rus", which occurred in the Eastern European territory around the ancient city of Kiev. The origin and rise of these predecessors, together with their discovery of Eastern Orthodox Christianity - their attempt to coalesce and their fatal clash with the eastern Tatar invaders, from the 9th to the 13th centuries A.D. - produced two impressive literary languages and documents well worthy of serous study.
Subsequent history contributed to a literature that reflected human life and its nature and spirit. That history included that formation of a huge empire, starting around the city of Moscow in the 14th century and expanding under the rule of a government located in the more recent city of St. Petersburg from the early 18th century. Two cataclysmic 20th-century revolutions, which led first to the formation of the USSR in the early 1920s, then to the reestablishment of Russia as a federation in 1991, also greatly influenced the shape of literature.
After a consideration of the early formation of Russia and some of its basic documents, which provide important direction for the centuries ahead, we shall move to the 19th and 20th centuries.
We shall look at Pushkin touted as the poetic "Sun of Russian Literature" and the "Mozart of the 19th century". Then we will examine the art of Gogol, with its remarkable combination of humor and the grotesque. The two prose giants of Russia will follow: Dostoyevsky, with his dialectic between the depths of human pathology and the heights of religious inspiration, and Tolstoy, with his enormous universe of creatures, both animal and human, no two of whom are alike. Between these two giants came a very fine writer, Turgenev, who found himself, as a Russian liberal of the 1860s, caught between the radicals and the conservatives, the Westernizers and the Slavophile admirers of old Russian culture, not to immediate shapers of the 20th century: Chekhov, who has become the god of the American and British theater, and Gorky, who stood on the edge of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and survived to become the icon of Soviet ideology in literature.
From the time of the USSR, we will examine Maiakovsky, who saw the Russian Revolution as the greatest and most humane achievement of human history; Sholokhov, whose prize-winning novel saw the revolution as a tragedy that destroyed the Cossack world that he loved so well; Zoshchenko, who saw the revolution as food for parody and satire; Pasternak, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, who also wrote a Nobel prize-winning novel; Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the reality of the Soviet forced labor camps and continued to speak prophetically until he reached what he considered enlightened new nationalism.
We will conclude with the situation in post-Soviet Russia. In what ways can it become the worthy inheritor of such a powerful and all-embracing literary culture?"

DVD CONTENTS: Disc 1
Lecture 1: Origins of Russian literature
Lecture 2: The Church and the folk in Old Kiev
Lecture 3: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 1799-1837
Lecture 4: Exile, rustic seclusion, and Onegin
Lecture 5: December's uprising and two poets meet
Lecture 6: A poet contrasts talent versus mediocrity
Disc 2
Lecture 7: St. Petersburg glorified and death embraced
Lecture 8: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol', 1809-1852
Lecture 9: Russian grotesque, overcoats to dead souls
Lecture 10: Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821-1881
Lecture 11: Near mortality, prison, and an underground
Lecture 12: Second wife and a great crime novel begins
Disc 3
Lecture 13: Inside the troubled mind of a criminal
Lecture 14: The generation of the Karamazovs
Lecture 15: The novelistic presence of Christ and Satan
Lecture 16: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910
Lecture 17: Tale of two cities and a country home
Lecture 18: Family life meets military life
Disc 4
Lecture 19: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord
Lecture 20: Family life makes a comeback
Lecture 21: Tolstoy the preacher
Lecture 22: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818-1883
Lecture 23: The stresses between two generations
Lecture 24: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860-1904
Disc 5

Lecture 25: M. Gorky (Aleksei M. Peshkov), 1868-1936
Lecture 26: Literature and revolution
Lecture 27: The Tribune: Vladimir Maiakovsky, 1893-1930
Lecture 28: The revolution makes a U-turn
Lecture 29: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, 1905-1984
Lecture 30: Revolutions and civil war
Disc 6

Lecture 31: Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, 1895-1958
Lecture 32: Among the godless: religion and family life
Lecture 33: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1890-1960
Lecture 34: The poet in and beyond society
Lecture 35: Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, born 1918
Lecture 36: The many colors of Russian literature

"Throughout the entire world, Russian culture - and most especially its 19th-century literature - has acquired an enormous reputation. Like the heydays of other cultures - the Golden Age of Athens, the biblical period of the Hebrews, the Renaissance of the Italians, the Elizabethan period in England - the century of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, and other great Russian writers seems, to many readers, like a great moral spiritual compass, pointing the way toward deeper and wider understanding of what some call "the Russian soul", but many others would call the soul of every human being.
How did this culture come about, within the context of a huge continental country, perched on the cusp between European and Asiatic civilizations, taking part in all of them yet not becoming completely subject to or involved in any of them? What were the origins of this culture? How did it grow and exert its influence, first on its neighbors, then on countries and civilizations far from its borders? What influences did it feel from without, and how did it adapt and shape these influences for Russian ends? What were its inner sources of strength and understanding that allowed it to tough - and sometimes to clash with - these other cultures and still come out with something distinctively Russian? What wider implications does this process have for the entire human race?
Such as the questions and musings of the mind and the heart that these lectures will attempt to arouse and entertain. No final solutions can possibly be claimed, but some amusement and, perhaps, instruction and enlightenment may well be encountered.
Some consideration will be given to the very first predecessors of the contemporary Russians and their so-called "era of Rus", which occurred in the Eastern European territory around the ancient city of Kiev. The origin and rise of these predecessors, together with their discovery of Eastern Orthodox Christianity - their attempt to coalesce and their fatal clash with the eastern Tatar invaders, from the 9th to the 13th centuries A.D. - produced two impressive literary languages and documents well worthy of serous study.
Subsequent history contributed to a literature that reflected human life and its nature and spirit. That history included that formation of a huge empire, starting around the city of Moscow in the 14th century and expanding under the rule of a government located in the more recent city of St. Petersburg from the early 18th century. Two cataclysmic 20th-century revolutions, which led first to the formation of the USSR in the early 1920s, then to the reestablishment of Russia as a federation in 1991, also greatly influenced the shape of literature.
After a consideration of the early formation of Russia and some of its basic documents, which provide important direction for the centuries ahead, we shall move to the 19th and 20th centuries.
We shall look at Pushkin touted as the poetic "Sun of Russian Literature" and the "Mozart of the 19th century". Then we will examine the art of Gogol, with its remarkable combination of humor and the grotesque. The two prose giants of Russia will follow: Dostoyevsky, with his dialectic between the depths of human pathology and the heights of religious inspiration, and Tolstoy, with his enormous universe of creatures, both animal and human, no two of whom are alike. Between these two giants came a very fine writer, Turgenev, who found himself, as a Russian liberal of the 1860s, caught between the radicals and the conservatives, the Westernizers and the Slavophile admirers of old Russian culture, not to immediate shapers of the 20th century: Chekhov, who has become the god of the American and British theater, and Gorky, who stood on the edge of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and survived to become the icon of Soviet ideology in literature.
From the time of the USSR, we will examine Maiakovsky, who saw the Russian Revolution as the greatest and most humane achievement of human history; Sholokhov, whose prize-winning novel saw the revolution as a tragedy that destroyed the Cossack world that he loved so well; Zoshchenko, who saw the revolution as food for parody and satire; Pasternak, one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, who also wrote a Nobel prize-winning novel; Solzhenitsyn, who first exposed the reality of the Soviet forced labor camps and continued to speak prophetically until he reached what he considered enlightened new nationalism.
We will conclude with the situation in post-Soviet Russia. In what ways can it become the worthy inheritor of such a powerful and all-embracing literary culture?"

DVD CONTENTS:

Part One

Disc 1
Lecture 1: Origins of Russian literature
Lecture 2: The Church and the folk in Old Kiev
Lecture 3: Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin, 1799-1837
Lecture 4: Exile, rustic seclusion, and Onegin
Lecture 5: December's uprising and two poets meet
Lecture 6: A poet contrasts talent versus mediocrity
Disc 2
Lecture 7: St. Petersburg glorified and death embraced
Lecture 8: Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol', 1809-1852
Lecture 9: Russian grotesque, overcoats to dead souls
Lecture 10: Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1821-1881
Lecture 11: Near mortality, prison, and an underground
Lecture 12: Second wife and a great crime novel begins

Part Two

Disc 3
Lecture 13: Inside the troubled mind of a criminal
Lecture 14: The generation of the Karamazovs
Lecture 15: The novelistic presence of Christ and Satan
Lecture 16: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, 1828-1910
Lecture 17: Tale of two cities and a country home
Lecture 18: Family life meets military life
Disc 4
Lecture 19: Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord
Lecture 20: Family life makes a comeback
Lecture 21: Tolstoy the preacher
Lecture 22: Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, 1818-1883
Lecture 23: The stresses between two generations
Lecture 24: Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, 1860-1904

Part Three

Disc 5
Lecture 25: M. Gorky (Aleksei M. Peshkov), 1868-1936
Lecture 26: Literature and revolution
Lecture 27: The Tribune: Vladimir Maiakovsky, 1893-1930
Lecture 28: The revolution makes a U-turn
Lecture 29: Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov, 1905-1984
Lecture 30: Revolutions and civil war
Disc 6
Lecture 31: Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko, 1895-1958
Lecture 32: Among the godless: religion and family life
Lecture 33: Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, 1890-1960
Lecture 34: The poet in and beyond society
Lecture 35: Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, born 1918
Lecture 36: The many colors of Russian literature