Agnieszka Makles

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.

Prerequisite: 860:101 or placement.

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.

Professor Cori Anderson

This one-credit supplementary course helps students improve their pronunciation, intonation, listening, and conversation skills in standard Russian. Students navigate Russian language websites, watch excerpts of Russian film and television, and listen to Russian music and radio broadcasts. Only open to students who are currently enrolled in Russian 102.

Professor Cori Anderson

Prerequisite: 01:860:201 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 strongly recommended that students also take Intermediate Russian Conversation 860:204:01. Fulfills SAS core goal AH q.

Professor Cori Anderson

This one-credit course continues to aid students in improving pronunciation, intonation, listening, and conversation skills in standard Russian. Students will navigate Russian websites, watch excerpts of Russian film and television, and listen to Russian music and radio broadcasts. Only open to students who are currently enrolled in Russian 202.

Svetlana Bogomolny

Prerequisite: 860:207 or placement. Not for students who have taken 860:102.

Intermediate Russian for Russian Speakers is designed for students who learned Russian at home or from family members, and have had some formal study, including Russian 207. This course focuses on improving grammatical control, and expanding active vocabulary for discussing abstract topics. Students will improve their reading skills, through literary and non-literary texts of increasing length and difficulty, and their writing skills, working towards the goal of creating cohesive and organized paragraph-lengthy texts. Students will also increase their knowledge of Russian history, culture, geography and traditions through authentic materials, such as texts, films, music and other supplementary materials. Fulfills SAS core goal AH q.

Professor Chloë Kitzinger

In English. No prerequisites. 

In this course, we have the rare chance to spend a semester reading just one book: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69). War and Peace tells the story of Russia’s military struggles with Napoleon between 1805 and 1812, but it is also a story about many other things: friendship, love, violence, and death; parents and children, imperialism, nationalism, and strategy, and the search for one’s place in the world. As we read the novel, we will pause to explore in depth some of the big questions it raises: the atrocities of war; how history gets written; the uses of art and literature; and the problems of causality, moral responsibility, free will, and time. We will discuss the place of War and Peace in Tolstoy’s life and career, the book’s afterlife in film and stage adaptations, and the complications of reading it in a new era of Russian expansionism and war. Through all these topics, the course combines immersion in the world of War and Peace with an investigation of how and where the novel leads beyond its covers.

Fulfills SAS Core goal WCd.

Cori Anderson

Prerequisite: 01:860:301 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.

Lidia Levkovitch

In English. No prerequisites.

cross-listed with Comparative Literature 01:195:311:01

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) explored the human mind and soul through some of the most vivid and tenacious characters in world literature: murderers, madmen, children, terrorists, atheists, and prostitutes; brothers and sisters; gamblers and saints. This course traces Dostoevsky’s career as a literary celebrity, political prisoner, traveler, journalist, religious and nationalist thinker, and especially, as a novelist who pushed the genre to its outermost formal and philosophical bounds.  Our readings will represent this thematic and stylistic variety, from Dostoevsky’s early epistolary novella Poor People (1864) and his fictionalized memoir Notes from a Dead House (1862) to his sprawling novels Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Demons (1872). No prerequisites; all readings and discussions in English.

Fulfills SAS Core goals AHo, AHp.

Professor Pavel Khazanov

In English. No prerequisites.

cross-listed with Comparative Literature 01:195:397:01 and English 01:358:363:02

Moralism and perversion. Games with truth. Meanspirited narrators, unreliable victims, titillated readers. And perhaps the most impressive trick– to become a famous author writing in two different languages, in two separate literary traditions. Our course will examine the works of the Russian and American writer Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), starting with his greatest, most scandalous success, the novel Lolita, and then working backwards and forwards, first to groundbreaking Russian short stories and novels like The Defense, and then to American creations, such as Pnin and Pale Fire, among others. Through this circular motion, we will try to make sense of the transnational, epochal forces that shaped this author and his works–such as aesthetic modernism and postmodernism, revolution and emigration, intellectual precarity and controversial mass-market notoriety. And in the midst of all of these forces, we will encounter again and again a central hero–the lyrical, unheroic and very often not entirely benign uprooted intellectual, a peculiar symbol of the twentieth century, its grand truths, and its catastrophic fictions. No prerequisites; all readings and discussions in English.

Professor Cori Anderson - TTh5

Prerequisite: 01:860:302, or 01:860:306, or placement. May be taken out of sequence with 860:401, 860:402, 860:404, or 860:407.

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 recollections of Perestroika (Soviet political reforms of the 1980s) and contemporary cultures that emerged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the changes in the economy, family relations, domestic politics, and foreign policy. Students will read literary and non-literary texts on these topics, alongside contemporary films and television programs.

Professor Emily Van Buskirk

cross-listed with Comparative Literature 01:195:480:03 and Women’s & Gender Studies 01:988:435:01

In English. No prerequisites.

In this course we study questions of gender and sexuality in modern Russian literature and culture through close readings of novellas, short stories, poems, films, essays, and memoirs. How have gender and sexuality been constructed in different periods of Russian history? What erotic utopias did radical thinkers propose? How did Soviet ideology build on traditional myths and images of femininity and masculinity? How have gay and lesbian love been represented, given the enduring presence of cultural taboos? The course will move from key (pre-)19th-century predecessors (fairy tales, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy), through the turbulent decades surrounding the Bolshevik Revolution (symbolism and decadence, various avant-garde movements, Socialist Realism), and on to contemporary literature with its flowering of feminist writing and performance. We will broaden our study through encounters with influential theoretical and critical texts, both inside and outside the Russian tradition.