Russian Courses
Polish Courses
SAS Core Courses
- Introduction to 19th Century Russian Literature 01:860:259:01
- Russia Between Empire and Nation 01:860:272:01
- Stories of Russian Life: Memory, Invention, Experience 01:860:348:01
Need to take a placement test? Click here.
Considering a major or minor in Russian?
Russian Language Courses
Elementary Russian I - Hybrid section
01:860:101:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
MTh3 11:30am-12:50pm, FH A4
This course/section of Elementary Russian (see full description below) is a “hybrid” of traditional and online learning. Students will meet face-to-face for two 80-minute classes per week, and will complete online assignments twice per week. This is a four-credit course, meaning that you are expected to engage with the materials for 6-8 hours outside of class (roughly one hour every day), including your online assignments, written homework, and other study. By working outside of class on aspects of how Russian works, we will have more time in class to focus on using Russian to communicate, implementing what is practiced online. Online assignments will include reading dialogues and grammar explanations, and completing exercises to test reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary and grammar, and speaking. Some material will be presented for the first time online, but there will always be time for review and questions in the face-to-face sessions. There will also be written homework, typically due at each face-to-face class session.
Elementary Russian I
01:860:101:02
Alexander Pichugin
MTTh2 9:50am-11:10am, M SC 203, TTh AB 3200
Open only to students with NO prior knowledge of Russian. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.
Elementary Russian is an intensive introductory course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students with no prior experience in the language. It develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing, as well as the basics of Russian grammar. It also introduces students to Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, various media, and other supplementary materials. It is highly recommended that all 860:101 also take First Year Russian Language Lab.
First Year Russian Language Lab
01:860:103:01
Alexander Pichugin
T5 2:50pm-4:10pm, SC 203
Using the audiovisual and digital capabilities of the Language Lab on College Avenue, the course helps students improve their pronunciation, intonation, listening, and conversation skills in standard Russian. Students will learn to use a Russian keyboard and to navigate Russian language websites. Other materials include authentic Russian print media and audio-visual materials, such as film clips and cartoons. Only open to students who are currently enrolled in Russian 101.
Intermediate Russian I
01:860:201:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
MTTh5 2:50pm-4:10pm, SC 207
Prerequisite: 01:860:102 or placement. Not for students who have taken 01:860:107.
Intermediate Russian is an intensive intermediate course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students who have completed Russian 102 or placed into the course by exam. This course is not for students who have completed Russian 107 or those who speak Russian at home with their family. The course develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing. It includes a review and expansion of Russian grammar and vocabulary. It deepens students’ understanding of Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other supplementary materials. It is highly recommended that all 860:201 students also take Second Year Russian Language Lab.
Second Year Russian Language Lab
01:860:203:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
M6 4:30-5:50pm, HC S120
Using the audiovisual and digital capabilties of the Language Lab on College Avenue, the course continues helping students improve pronunciation, intonation, listening, and conversation skills in standard Russian. Students will master use of a Russian keyboard and to navigate Russian language websites. Other materials include authentic Russian print media and audio-visual materials, such as television clips and cartoons. Only open to students who are currently enrolled in Russian 201 or 207.
Elementary Russian for Russian Speakers
01:860:207:01
Svetlana Bogomolny
MTTh3 11:30am-12:50pm, Scott Hall 220
Prerequisite: Placement. Credit not given for both this course and 860:201.
Second Year Russian for Russian Speakers is intended for students who learned to speak Russian in the home or from family members, with little or no formal study or experience with reading or writing Russian. Students will master reading and writing in the Russian alphabet, solidify their knowledge of Russian grammar, including case endings and verbal forms, and increase their vocabulary. This course also introduces students to Russian culture, literature and history through authentic target-language texts, websites and media (including films and music) and other supplementary materials.
Advanced Russian I
01:860:301:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
TTh6 4:30pm-5:50pm, HC S126
Prerequisite: 860:202, 860:208, or placement.
This is an advanced course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students who have completed the equivalent of four semesters of college-level Russian, or have placed into the course by exam. The course strengthens grammatical control and develops proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing. Students will learn to summarize, develop narration, and create connected paragraphs in speech and writing. The will also study complex grammatical structures, such as participles and gerunds, and syntactic constructions, such as subordination. They will broaden their vocabulary through the study of word-formation. This course covers many elements of modern Russian life, such as education, employment, leisure and youth culture, through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other materials.
America Through Russian Eyes
01:860:401:01
Svetlana Bogomolny
TTh5 2:50pm-4:10pm, SC 220
Prerequisite: 01:860:302, or 01:860:306, or placement. May be taken out of sequence with 860: 401, 860:403, or 860:404.
This course fulfills a literature course requirement for the Russian Language minor.
Taught primarily in Russian, the course fosters advanced language skills of conversational fluency, listening comprehension, writing and composition, expanded vocabulary, recognition of stylistic registers, and advanced syntax. These skills are practiced while exploring the topic of Russian attitudes to America in the course of the last century.
Russian Literature Courses
Introduction to 19th Century Russian Literature: Russia's Long Nineteenth Century in Literature, Culture and Memory
01:860:259:01
Professor Pavel Khazanov
TTh4, 1:10pm-2:30pm, SC 202
In English. No prerequisites.
Are we Western or are we not? Are we the tsar’s trusted subjects or are we disloyal and dispensable? What is slavery and what is freedom? What is progress and where is God? For over a hundred years in the lead-up to the Russian Revolution, these “accursed questions” occupied Russia’s greatest writers and shaped their world-famous classic texts. Proceeding in modules, our class will read those texts to give an account of Russian everyday life, culture and politics from the late 1700s to the 1910s. Our books will include classics by Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov and Chekhov, as well as other writers less well known in the West. All readings in English. Satisfies Core Requirement AHp.
Russia Between Empire and Nation
01:860:272:01
Cross listed with Comparative Literature (01:195:272:01)
Professor Pavel Khazanov
TTh6, 4:30pm-5:50pm, MU 114
In English. No prerequisites.
The Russian tsars called Moscow the New Jerusalem. The Russian emperors preferred Third Rome or Great European Power. Soviet leaders called it the Friendship of the Peoples. Reagan denounced it as the Evil Empire. Over the course of several centuries some idea of imperial dominance has been used to define how Russia has related to its many borderlands and its external neighbors. Meanwhile, for successive generations cultural elites, Russia’s vast territory has constantly presented a creative problem, inspiring pride, confusion, and resentment–sometimes all at once, in the very same people. Our course will try to understand why that is, by examining how Russian and Russophone literature and art has engaged with Russia’s complicated territorial identity, focusing especially on the last two hundred years. All readings, films, and class discussions in English. No prerequisites. Satisfies Core Requirement CC, AHp.
Reading Russian Literature in Russian
01:860:315:01
Professor Emily Van Buskirk
MTh3, 11:30am-12:50pm, M SC 202, Th AB 2250
Prerequisite: 860:202 or 860:207
This course is required of all Russian majors and counts as a literature course for minors in Russian Language & Literature and in Russian Language.
This course introduces students to critical issues involved in reading literary texts in the original Russian. We aim for a refined understanding of how meaning is conveyed by grammar, syntax, stylistic register, and the techniques of Russian versification. We leran about the development and traditions of Russian poetry and prose while encountering some of the most distinctive Russian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries (Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Bulgakov, Brodsky, and others). The course is useful to all students who wish to improve their reading, language, interpretive, and analytical skills. It is required of all majors and counts as a literature course for minors in Russian Language and Literature and in Russian Language. All readings in Russian. Discussions and written assignments in English.
From Dostoevsky to the Wire: Serial Storytelling Across Media
01:860:345:01
Cross-listed with Comparative Literature (195:345:01)
Professor Chloë Kitzinger
MW4, 1:10pm-2:30pm, CA A3
In English. No prerequisites.
This course investigates serial narrative as a modern mode of storytelling, from the emergence of the serialized novel in 19th-century Europe and Russia up through contemporary American serial television and podcasts. Through discussions of serial narratives from multiple times and in multiple media, we will explore the enduring power of this versatile narrative form — in particular, its capacity to interweave fiction with the course of current events and the rhythms of everyday life. Core texts include Charles Dickens’s pioneering first serialized novel, Oliver Twist (1837-39); a masterpiece of the European serialized novel at its height, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866); and two modern-day evolutions of serial narrative, David Simon’s HBO series The Wire (2004-2008) and Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder’s podcast Serial (2014-2015). Occasional critical readings also suggested or assigned. All readings and discussions in English.
Stories of Russian Life: Memory, Invention, Experience
01:860:348:01
Professor Emily Van Buskirk
MW5, 2:50pm-4:10pm, MU 213
In English. No prerequisites.
In this course we read stories that reflect experiences of Russian life, ranging from a happy childhood on an aristocratic estate to the suffering of a Soviet labor camp. When writing about their lives in autobiographies, memoirs, essays, or diaries, how do writers construct a self in the process of producing a text? How do they fashion a text that reflects the self? How do they select which experiences to represent or to omit? Where are the boundaries between fact and fiction? In readings that include a medieval monk's life and memoirs of the camps, as well as writings by some of Russia’s best known authors, we study the relationship between the individual and community, between personal life and dramatic historical events; between memory and invention; we explore the themes of childhood, first love, emigration, and confinement. We compare Russian non-fictions to fictional stories, in order to better understand important methods of artistic construction and interpretation. All readings and discussions are in English. There are no prerequisites. Fulfills SAS core goal WCd.
787 - Polish Courses
Elementary Polish I
01:787:101:01
Wanda Mandecki
MTh4 1:10-2:30pm, AB 2150, T4, AB 2200
Open to students with NO prior knowledge of Polish. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.
Elementary Polish is an introductory course intended for students with no or minimal prior experience in the language. Students will learn the Polish sound and spelling system. They will develop proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The basic of grammar and core vocabulary are introduced. In addition, the course provides an introduction to Polish culture, including geography, history, literature and practices through authentic texts, maps, websites and other supplementary materials.
Intermediate Polish I
01:787:201:01
Wanda Mandecki
MTTh5 2:50-4:10pm, AB 2250
Prerequisite: 787:102 or placement.
Intermediate Polish is intended for students who have completed Elementary Polish or have placed into the course. Students will continue to develop proficiency in four skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Orthography drills reinforce the sound and spelling system. This course will broaden students’ grammatical understanding and vocabulary. Students will read an authentic literary text, view a Polish film, and discuss current events in Poland, which will deepen students' knowledge of Polish history and culture.
