Spring 2026

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)

This one-credit course supplements work in Elementary Russian I (01:860:102), 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 every semester. 

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.

This one-credit course supplements work in Intermediate Russian I (01:860:202), 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 every semester. 

Professor Pavel Khazanov

In English. No prerequisites.

cross-listed with Art History 01:082:204:01 and Comparative Literature 01:195:265:01

Can art transform life? How do artists and writers advance concepts of “reality” and who gets to pass judgment on their claims? To what extent can creative elites flex their political power through their creations? To what extent is an appearance of power a fiction that conveniently serves another, far more powerful master? And what happens to art if the state itself starts thinking of itself as an artist, which is what, according to some theorists, the USSR began to do under Stalin?

We will engage with the above questions by examining the interaction of art and politics in Soviet culture. We will reflect on the history of Soviet artists’ direct attempts to intervene in social life– via exhibitions, via politics at the Soviet Artists’ and Writers’ Unions, via newspapers, magazines and ‘agitation and propaganda’ (agitprop) materials, etc. By closely analyzing a wide cross-section of both mainstream and underground Soviet aesthetic artifacts that this historical context produced– including sculptures, paintings, literature, film, and theoretical writings about art, such as manifestos and critical interpretations— we will reflect on some of the biggest issues that concern art, such as the idea of ‘representation’ and ‘reality,’ the possibility of ‘making it new,’ or the notion of artistic autonomy. Visits to the Dodge collection of Nonconformist Art at the Zimmerli Museum will form an integral part of course curriculum. 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 01:195:272:01 and History 01:510:277:01

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. Putin calls it Russky mir or “Russian World.” 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 and how the periphery has related to the metropole. Meanwhile, for successive generations of cultural elites, Russia’s vast territory has constantly presented a 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 literatures and art of the peoples from the former Russian and Soviet empires have engaged with Russia’s complicated territorial identity, focusing especially on the last two hundred years. One of the objectives of the course is to provide foundations for better understanding Russia’s orientation in the world today as concerning to Eastern Europe and Eurasia. No prerequisites; all readings, films, and class discussions in English.

Fulfills SAS Core goals CC, AHp

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.

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 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.

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 history of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the independent nations occupying this territory since 1991.