Fall 2021

Agnieszka Makles

Open to students with NO prior knowledge of Polish. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.

Polish 101 is an introductory course designed for students with little to no prior experience with the Polish language. This course focuses on building foundational skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing while introducing key linguistic concepts such as phonetics, semantics, morphology, and syntax. Students will learn to communicate in everyday situations, engage with Polish culture, and explore the similarities and differences between their own cultural perspectives and those of Polish speakers. Through interaction with authentic multimodal texts, students will develop their ability to interpret and engage with real-world language use. The course also emphasizes basic pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects of Polish, preparing students for meaningful communication and cultural understanding.

Agnieszka Makles

Prerequisite: 787:102 or placement.

Polish 201 is an intermediate course designed for students who have some experience with the Polish language. This course focuses on building foundational skills in speaking, listening, reading, and writing while introducing key linguistic concepts such as phonetics, semantics, morphology, and syntax. Students will learn to communicate in everyday situations, engage with Polish culture, and explore the similarities and differences between their own cultural perspectives and those of Polish speakers. Through interaction with authentic multimodal texts, students will develop their ability to interpret and engage with real-world language use. The course also emphasizes basic pragmatic and sociolinguistic aspects of Polish, preparing students for meaningful communication and cultural understanding.

Professor Cori Anderson

Prerequisite: 01:860:102 or placement.

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 the life, culture, history, geography, and traditions of the Russian-speaking world 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 Russian Conversation (860:211, T 10:35-11:30).

Prerequisite: Placement.Credit not given for both this course and 860:201.

Elementary 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 the culture, literature and history of the Russian-speaking world through authentic target-language texts, websites and media (including films and music) and other supplementary materials.

Professor Emily Van Buskirk

In English. No prerequisites. 

Russia’s twentieth century was punctuated by revolutions that brought radical transformations in culture, politics, and society to this vast country (and the world beyond).  A tsarist autocracy became a communist, totalitarian state, whose eventual disintegration left behind a fragile, capitalist democracy at the century’s end.  In this course we study how Russian literature reflects the ways in which individual experiences and identities were shaped by dramatic (and often catastrophic) experiences such as revolution, collectivization, industrialization, war, terror, and the prison camp system.  We focus on the artistic movements that surrounded the October Revolution of 1917, and the subsequent literature that was suppressed, muted, or twisted by Stalinist policies.  We read works from the “thaw” period (after Stalin’s death), the perestroika era in (1985-1991), and the early post-Communist years.  We study masterful novels (by Zamyatin, Bulgakov, Nabokov, Petrushevskaya), poems (by Blok, Mayakovsky, and Akhmatova), short stories, and film.  We place these works in the context of Russian (Soviet) culture and history.  This course fulfills the Core curriculum goal AH p.  All readings and discussion in English.

 Professor Cori Anderson

Prerequisite: 860:202, 860:208, or placement.

Advanced Russian is 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. They will also study complex grammatical structures, such as participles and gerunds, and syntactic constructions, such as subordination. These skills are practiced in conjunction with the viewing, discussion and analysis of contemporary Russian-language films and television programs. Students will also increase their intercultural competence by exploring the cultural products and practices of the Russian-speaking world in the 21st century.

In English. No prerequisites.

What do I believe in? What is art? What, then, must we do? Each of these driving questions is also the title of a work by Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), author of the great novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. A novelist who denied the value of high art, an army officer who became a radical pacifist, a nobleman who strove to free himself of wealth and privilege, and a Christian who wrote his own version of the Gospels – throughout his long life, Tolstoy fought like few others to define and realize his evolving vision of the place and purpose of human life. This course invites you to respond actively to Tolstoy’s vision at a time of change, uncertainty, and upheaval in our contemporary world – when big questions about the nature of community, conservation, social justice and the good confront each one of us daily. 

In the first half of the semester, we will read some of Tolstoy’s early fiction and his masterpiece Anna Karenina (1875-77). In the second half, we will explore his late short stories and globally influential essays on religion, vegetarianism, capital punishment, inequality, education, and non-violence (among other topics). As part of this exploration, you will be asked to participate in a community engagement project that meets your interests, and to reflect on that experience in direct conversation with Tolstoy’s works. In English. No prerequisites. Fulfills SAS Core goals AHo, AHp, and WCd.

 Professor Semyon Leonenko

Prerequisite: 01:860:302, or 01:860:306, or placement. May be taken out of sequence with 860:401, 860:402, 860:403, or 860:404.

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 through exploration major issues in Soviet history and Russian culture throughout the 20th century, such as de-Stalinization, art & censorship, the dissident movement, and political repression, through the viewing of the contemporary television show The Thaw (2013, Valery Todorovsky). Students will also read literary and non-literary texts and watch additional feature and documentary films related to the events and cultural phenomena in each of the 12 episodes.

Professor Semyon Leonenko

In English. No prerequisites.

The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80), Fyodor Dostoevsky's final novel, is a classic of world literature. It also crystallized a set of ideas about Russian identity that continue to shape the national discourse, including the propaganda surrounding Russia's brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. In this course, we will read The Brothers Karamazov with close attention to its narrative and thematic structure, exploring the philosophical, religious, and aesthetic questions the novel asks as well as the intractable political problems with which it presents us as readers now. We will place the novel in context by reading selections from Dostoevsky’s earlier fiction and journalism as well as selections from his lifelong “bookshelf," including the Book of Job, excerpts from saints’ lives, and works of Friedrich Schiller, Alexander Pushkin, and Nikolai Gogol. Finally, we will discuss echoes of The Brothers Karamazov into the 20th-21st centuries: dialogues with Dostoevsky from writers like Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as contemporary responses to the novel. All readings and discussion in English; no previous knowledge of Russian literature required. Satisfies learning goals for the Russian and Comparative Literature majors and minors and the Russian Major requirement of a 400-level course.