The Devil Went Down to Moscow
$500.00
Date: Eight weekly sessions on Mondays, starting October 7 and ending December 9
Time: 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. Eastern
Cost: C$500
Note: No meetings October 14 and 28
In stock
LEADER
Rosemary Gould has been leading seminars for Classical Pursuits for many years, usually on lyric poetry in English. She has a PhD in English literature from the University of Virginia. But she also studied Russian in college and spent a summer in a language program in Leningrad in 1986, when it was still behind the iron curtain. She also tried to translate a few poems by Blok and Mandelstam. The Master and Margarita is possibly her favorite novel of all time.
READINGS
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor
Abrams (2021)
ISBN-13: 978-1419756504
“Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova, available here
In addition to the novel and “Requiem,” there will be a short PDF of other poems that Rosemary will compile and sent out.
Since the Stalinist era in Russia, three artists have emerged as particularly important creative witnesses to the devastating events of that time: Anna Akhmatova, Mikhael Bulgakov, and Osip Mandelstam. In this seminar, we will focus most of all on Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, considered by many Russians to be their greatest novel of the 20th century, and we will also discuss a small selection of poems by Akhmatova and Mandelstam.
The three writers were friends during the Terror. Each of them was suppressed as a writer by the regime, and they each refused to silence themselves in spite of the danger. They tried to communicate the collective experience that they believed was almost beyond language, and therefore the most creative and unique brilliance of each writer had to rise to the impossible occasion. Reading them together will add great depth to our experience of each one.
“In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line
outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing
behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard
me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked
me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
“Can you describe this?”
And I said: “I can.”
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
-“”Requiem”” by Anna Akhmatova”
Practical details
Once you register, you’ll get an order confirmation. We’ll send you the Zoom link and a welcome letter from your leader about 3 weeks before the seminar starts.
Classical Pursuits will record this seminar, and make each session privately available to registered participants for up to two weeks after that session.
Online seminar payments are nonrefundable. Discount codes must be used at the time of purchase.
Seminar group sizes are a minimum of 7 and a maximum of 12. See full terms and conditions for Classical Pursuits online seminars. By registering for a seminar, you agree to abide by our code of conduct.
Image credit: Poster for production Master and Margarita in Theatre Near the Bridge in Perm (2005), Wikimedia Commons
Additional information
| Zola Seminar Options | The Assommoir + Germinal, The Assommoir only, Germinal only |
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