Fall 2025

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 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.

Professor Cori Anderson (Section 02)

Professor Semyon Leonenko (Section 01)

Only open 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 students also take Russian Conversation I (01:860:111).

In Fall 2025, we will offer two sections of Elementary Russian I, 01:860:101:01 and 01:860:101:02. They will meet in the hybrid format, which means that two class sessions each week will meet in person, and additional work will be completed asynchronously online.

Professor Semyon Leonenko

This one-credit course supplements work in Elementary Russian I (01:860:101), providing extra practice with the pronunciation, phonetics, intonation, and grammar of Russian, while also introducing students to additional products and practices of Russian culture as well as history. Students will navigate the Russian internet, watch excerpts of Russian film and television, listen to Russian music, etc. as a means of enhancing the material of language courses. Students will frequently work in groups based on their proficiency levels to focus on specific topics and grammatical constructions. This course may be taken multiple times for credit, as the content changes.

Professor Cori Anderson

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 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 I (01:860:211)

 Professor Mi E Li

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 Semyon Leonenko

This one-credit course supplements work in Intermediate Russian I (01:860:201), providing extra practice with the pronunciation, phonetics, intonation, and grammar of Russian, while also introducing students to additional products and practices of Russian culture as well as history. Students will navigate the Russian internet, watch excerpts of Russian film and television, listen to Russian music, etc. as a means of enhancing the material of language courses. Students will frequently work in groups based on their proficiency levels to focus on specific topics and grammatical constructions. This course may be taken multiple times for credit, as the content changes.

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.

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 life in the Russian-speaking world, such as education, employment, leisure and youth culture, through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other materials.

Professor Cori Anderson

This one-credit course supplements work in Advanced Russian I (01:860:301), providing extra review of topics in Russian grammar and syntax. These topics include case declension & usage, verb conjugation, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, time expressions, participles, gerunds, and compound sentences. Students will frequently work in groups based on their proficiency levels to focus on specific grammatical constructions. This course may be taken multiple times for credit, as the content changes every semester.

Professor Lidia Levkovitch

What does it mean to be sentient? To have free will? To be human? To be alive? How can we ethically interact with the Other that embodies some, but not all, of those concepts, the Other we cannot hope to fully understand? And what kind of society can be built by individuals whose very self-definition is in constant flux? Questions such as these seem to be on everyone’s mind as humanity grapples with proliferation of artificial intelligence, but their roots certainly go much deeper. Even when the technology that forms the fabric of today’s reality existed only in intellectual paradoxes and thought experiments, the imagination of artists and thinkers who pondered those hypotheticals was shaped by philosophical, moral, social, and political challenges of their times. In Russian and Eastern European Science Fiction, we will explore a literary genre that flourished in Russia and the Soviet bloc alongside real-life endeavors to build a utopian society and create a “new human” through revolution and technological progress. As we experience iconic works by artists such as Evgeny Zamiatin, Mikhail Bulgakov, Karel Čapek, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Stanislaw Lem, we might be struck by the prescience with which some of them predict the future. We will also focus on the present that the creators had to contend with, following the socialist experiment through “the long 20^th century,” from its violent origins to its stagnation and collapse with its aftermath.

No prerequisites; all readings and discussions in English. Fulfills Core requirement AHo.

Cross-listed with Comparative Literature

Professor Emily Van Buskirk

Fulfills Honors College Global Competence requirement

crosslisted with Comparative Literature 01:195:348:01

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.  Authors include Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Shalamov, Brodsky, Evgeniia Ginzburg, Sadulaev, and Alexievich.  When writing about their lives in autobiographies, memoirs, essays, diaries, or documentary prose, 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?  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.  New additions to this course’s readings will help us reflect on the ongoing war in Ukraine, and on issues of empire and violence in post-Soviet space.  All readings and discussions are in English. There are no prerequisites. Fulfills SAS core goal WCd. Fulfills Honors College Global Competence requirement.

 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 Cori Anderson

This one-credit course supplements work in  400-level courses taught in Russian, providing extra review of topics in Russian grammar and syntax. These topics include case declension & usage, verb conjugation, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, time expressions, participles, gerunds, and compound sentences. Students will frequently work in groups based on their proficiency levels to focus on specific grammatical constructions. This course may be taken multiple times for credit, as the content changes every semester.

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.