Modernization and Its Discontents: Teaching Literature in the New Russian School

Abstract

Every year for close to thirty years now prominent Russian secondary schools and universities have hosted the Lomonosov competition [Lomonosovskii turnir] for high schoolers. The competition is open to any student who wants to test his/her ability in any subject of the high school curriculum; there are no time restrictions for answering the questions, and the rewards are purely per sonal.2 In a recent round of literature competition contestants were asked to de termine which of the two poems offered to them for analysis was written by a prominent poet and which one was a parody. When the results were counted, 88% of the participants failed to distinguish between Afanasy Fet's poem and its parody by Kozma Prutkov. Notably, the most common answers focused on the paucity of lofty vocabulary and the preponderance of ordinary words in the poem mistakenly judged to be the parody. Arguing in favor of their (wrong) choice, students exhibited an uncanny familiarity with the cliches of superficial textbook analysis, memorable to all who had used Soviet texts in their schooling: a flowery appreciation of poetic style and a dogged search for the relevant socio-political content, patriotism, and moral values.3 More alarmingly, the research, conducted in 2004 among Russian high school students (age 15) by the Program for International Student Assessment