Spring 2024

Agnieszka Makles

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

In Elementary Polish II, the continuation of the introductory course, students further develop proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing with a focus on conversational language. The basics of grammar and core vocabulary are expanded. The course emphasizes Polish culture, including geography, history, literature, and customs, through authentic texts, songs, videos, maps, websites, and other supplementary materials.

Agnieszka Makles

Prerequisite: 787:201 or placement or permission.

Intermediate Polish II is intended for students who have completed Intermediate Polish I or have been placed into the course. Students continue developing their proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing, with an emphasis on conversational language. The course provides opportunities to apply grammatical knowledge in practice. Students engage with authentic literary texts, discuss current events in Poland, and watch Polish films, further deepening their understanding of Polish language, history, and culture. Fulfills SAS core goal AHq. 

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. 

It is strongly recommended that students also take Russian Conversation II: Novice to Intermediate (860:112/212)

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 Russian Conversation II: Novice to Intermediate (860:112/212). Fulfills SAS core goal AHq.

Taught by Mi E Li

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 AHq.

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. They 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.

Instructor: Dr. Laura Matthews [to be confirmed]

In English. No prerequisites.

Love and death push at the edges of the human experience, and writers of every era take up the challenge of depicting these ideas afresh. Our class will trace the evolution of love and death within the Russian-language short story form over almost two centuries, produced by writers like Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Lev Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Zinaida Gippius, Andrei Platonov, Yuri Trifonov, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Lyudmila Ulitsakaya, among others. We will consider how together, “love” and “death” drive storytelling and forge bonds between stories and readers. Why do we ‘believe’ in love or death in a given story? Do we seek to be inspired by stories of ‘ideal love’ or ‘beautiful death’? Do we prefer to follow realistic depictions of human desire, violence, and tragedy? Or might we be drawn to grotesque or surreal renderings of these existential forces? And what cultural-historical situations might lead writers and readers towards preferring one form over another? 

All readings and discussion in English. No prerequisites. Fulfills SAS core goals AH o, p; WC d.

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 MTh3

As historian Drew Faust has noted, “Only a story of purpose and legitimation can transform random violence into what human convention has designated as war.” In this course we study the experience of “war” as described in Russian- and Ukrainian-language short stories, novellas, poetry, diaries, memoir, and film, from the nineteenth century to Russia’s present war of aggression in Ukraine. How do narratives give voice to experiences of war, and represent what these experiences signify? A special focus of the course will be the Second World War, in which the Soviet Union triumphed while suffering unspeakable losses (roughly 26 million deaths). We will seek to understand not only how this war was experienced, but also how its memory cult has developed, and how it has lately been instrumentalized in reference to Russia’s current invasion of Ukraine. We will also reflect on poetry and prose by Ukrainian and Russian authors in our own day, documenting and representing the largest land war to afflict Europe since 1945. Throughout the course, the topic of war will serve as a window onto culture, values, memory, and literary politics.

All readings and discussions in English. No prerequisites. Fulfills WCr.

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.