{"id":372,"date":"2018-10-09T23:23:48","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T03:23:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/?p=372"},"modified":"2018-10-09T23:23:48","modified_gmt":"2018-10-10T03:23:48","slug":"hopeless-citizen-vs-hopeless-romantic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/the-domestic-exotic\/hopeless-citizen-vs-hopeless-romantic\/","title":{"rendered":"Hopeless Citizen vs. Hopeless Romantic"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Although I\u2019m not sure about the historical context of both of these works, I found the theme of hopelessness in both Bunin\u2019s \u201cCaucasus\u201d and Lermontov\u2019s \u201cFarewell to Russia\u201d to compliment each other in an interesting way.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Lermontov\u2019s \u201cFarewell to Russia\u201d seems to speak to Soviet Russia from a post-exile perspective. The speaker refers to Russia in many unfavorable ways, such as \u201cunwashed\u201d and a \u201cland of knaves.\u201d He also addresses the soviets directly as the people in \u201cneat blue uniforms\u201d who \u201clive like cringing slaves!\u201d The speaker\u2019s tone is resentful, which implies that he preferred Russia as it was before the revolution. The second stanza deals with the speaker\u2019s exile from Soviet Russia, presumably for his dissenting opinions. Although exile is normally seen as a fate worse than death, the speaker says that he \u201cmay find \/ peace beneath Caucasian skies, &#8211; \/ Far from slanderers and tsars, \/ Far from ever-spying eyes\u201d (1840). The speaker\u2019s preference for exile shows how unfavorable his view of Soviet Russia truly is.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bunin\u2019s short story \u201cCaucasus\u201d is about a woman who runs away from her oppressive husband with her lover. In the conclusion of the story, the scorned husband searches for his wife at all the false locations she gave him. When he does not find her he \u201cdrank a bottle of champagne and coffee with Chartreuse, slowly smoked a cigar. Then he went back to his room, lay down on the couch, put a pistol to each of his temples, and fired\u201d (285). <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Though the Bunin story does not deal as directly with Soviet Russia, the feeling of hopelessness comments on how collectivization affected all sectors of life at the time. Additionally, both works appreciated the vast expanses of nature that make Russia has and allude to some sort of pastoral beauty that was lost through industrialization. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Although I\u2019m not sure about the historical context of both of these works, I found the theme of hopelessness in both Bunin\u2019s \u201cCaucasus\u201d and Lermontov\u2019s \u201cFarewell to Russia\u201d to compliment each other in an interesting way. Lermontov\u2019s \u201cFarewell to Russia\u201d seems to speak to Soviet Russia from a post-exile perspective. The speaker refers to Russia [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":691,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[51,50],"class_list":["post-372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-domestic-exotic","tag-bunin","tag-lermontov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/691"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.bowdoin.edu\/russian-2447-fall-2018\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}