Jessica Draut - Alternative Topic #1

I am not a philosophy major. I am a history major. My favorite area of history is the Russian intelligentsia - particularly under the reign of Stalin. This is due to their overwhelming reliance on art - especially poetry - as a vehicle of expression and of relating truths to one another. There is a certain depth and spirituality to their writing that I have rarely seen anywhere else. When studying the role of the narrative paradigm and of myth itself, I immediately think back to the early late nineteenth century/twentieth century Russian poets. They had to communicate through the narrative paradigm because to express their opinions in plainer terms would have meant certain death.