This seminar will focus on the richness of 19th and 20th century Russian fiction (in English translation), and may include novels by Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolai Gogol, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Lev Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, and Lidiya Ginzburg. In addition to attending to the social and historical contexts of these works, the course may consider such topics as literary evolution, genre theory, ethics and aesthetics, religion in literature and literature as religion.