2025 Fall Distinquished Scholar Lecture

"Creative Writing 101 as Taught in Revolutionary Russia"
by Dr. Carol Any, Professor of Language and Culture Studies, Emerita

Tuesday, October 21, 2025, at 4:30pm
Reese Room, Smith House

This year's lecture is sponsored by Professor Martina Di Florio and the Italian Section of Language and Culture Studies

What is involved in the creative process?   How should aspiring writers be trained?
In an age of reading for entertainment, Bolshevik leaders intent on remaking culture for the communist era believed that their success would depend on the books people read for fun. They hoped writers would produce fiction with engaging heroes whom readers would view as role models. This lecture will address the various aesthetic views held by prominent Bolsheviks, as well as their disagreements over practices of teaching and mentoring young writers in academic seminars, workshops, and publishing houses.

 

Carol Any received her Ph.D. in Russian language and literature from the University of Chicago and taught at Trinity College from 1984 to 2025. Her researchcombines aesthetic theory, the relationship between the arts and ideology, and the lives and moral choices of writers living under political repression. She is the author of Boris Eikhenbaum: Voices of a Russian Formalist (Stanford University Press, 1994) and The Soviet Writers’ Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin (Northwestern University Press, 2020; winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies).