Russian (RUSS)

The course meets six hours per week with two professors. Emphasis on standard Moscow pronunciation and intonation through extensive work with on-line audio materials and in-class videos; comprehension and practice of everyday spoken Russian as used in different social situations. Fundamentals of Russian grammar and acquisition of basic vocabulary.

A continuation of RUSS-011 for students who have taken that course at Georgetown or who have the equivalent preparation. The course meets six hours per week with two professors. Emphasis on standard Moscow pronunciation and intonation through extensive work with on-line audio materials and in-class videos; comprehension and practice of everyday spoken Russian as used in different social situations. Continued fundamentals of Russian grammar and acquisition of basic vocabulary.

This one-credit course is a survey of major topics in Russian culture from its beginnings to the present. It will acquaint students with various issues and fields of inquiry in Russian language, literature, linguistics and culture and help provide the necessary background for further study, both in the U.S. and in the Russian Federation. It is also intended as an introductory course for interested students with little or no background in these subject areas. The course will be team-taught by members of the Department of Slavic Languages and will be primarily in lecture format. In the final three classes of the semester, a professor will be reporting on his or her individual research. All lectures and readings are in English.

This one-credit course is a survey of major topics in Russian culture from its beginnings to the present. It will acquaint students with various issues and fields of inquiry in Russian language, literature, linguistics and culture and help provide the necessary background for further study, both in the U.S. and in the Russian Federation. It is also intended as an introductory course for interested students with little or no background in these subject areas. The course will be team-taught by members of the Department of Slavic Languages and will be primarily in lecture format. In the final three classes of the semester, a professor will be reporting on his or her individual research. All lectures and readings are in English. (No prerequisites. Students need not have taken Russia A to Z I.)

The course meets six hours per week with two professors. It completes the introduction to the fundamentals of Russian grammar and develops students' control of everyday spoken and written Russian. The course includes work with audio and video recordings.

A continuation of RUSS-111 for students who have taken that course at Georgetown or have the equivalent preparation. The course meets six hours per week with two professors. It completes the introduction to the fundamentals of Russian grammar and develops students' control of everyday spoken and written Russian. The course includes work with audio and video recordings.

This course focuses on major topics of grammar that are reviewed and analyzed in greater depth. Special attention is paid to writing compositions and analyzing grammatical structures as they function in text. The course also includes the study of syntax, word order, word formation, and less frequently encountered structures.

This course focuses on oral proficiency. A variety of materials--textbook, video and audio recordings, Russian literature selections and readings in the Russian press--will be used to develop the students' ability to converse on daily topics and handle cultural, political and social issues in Russian life today.

(A continuation of RUSS-213). This course focuses on oral proficiency. A variety of materials--textbook, video and audio cassettes, Russian literature selections and readings in the Russian press--will be used to develop the students' ability to converse on daily topics and handle cultural, political and social issues in Russian life today.

The goal of the course is to enlarge students' vocabulary and to develop their ability to conduct conversation and discussion on a variety of issues and topics that pertain to the use of the language in their future professions. Class discussions focus on contemporary issues and are based on articles from the Russian press, the Internet, and television programs.

This course develops students' Russian language skills by reading, watching, analyzing, and discussing authentic cultural documents. We will read great (short) works of literature in the original Russian, watch classic Russian and Soviet films, analyze contemporary cultural trends and historical movements, and even annotate a few recent Russian music videos. Students will not only sharpen their reading, writing, listening and speaking skills in Russian, they will engage with a broad survey of important Russian culture. They will develop the intercultural sensitivity and understanding they need for careers or further study in Russia or the Russophone world.

Designed for graduate students in CERES and MSFS who will be using Russian in their professional lives, this course aims to enhance the participants' command of the language in both the oral and written forms. The course will focus on the preparation, delivery and discussion of oral presentations and written essays on topics related to the students' professional interests. Topics will range from international relations, politics and economics to Russian literature and popular culture.

Designed for graduate students in CERES and MSFS who will be using Russian in their professional lives, this course aims to enhance the participants' command of the language in both the oral and written forms. The course will focus on the preparation, delivery and discussion of oral presentations and written essays on topics related to the students' professional interests. Topics will range from international relations, politics and economics to Russian literature and popular culture.

The goal of this course is to develop participants’ professional command of Russian speech in oral and written forms. Special attention will be paid to the grammatical and lexical precision of the ideas and opinions on sophisticated professional topics. The focus is of this course is on the preparation, delivery, and discussion of oral presentations and written essays on topics related to participants’ professional interests. Topics will range from the fields of international relations, economics and politics, to Russian and Soviet culture and literature.

The goal of this course is to develop participants’ professional command of Russian speech in oral and written forms. Special attention will be paid to the grammatical and lexical precision of the ideas and opinions on sophisticated professional topics. The focus is of this course is on the preparation, delivery, and discussion of oral presentations and written essays on topics related to participants’ professional interests. Topics will range from the fields of international relations, economics and politics, to Russian and Soviet culture and literature.

This course explores the cinematic contributions of women directors, camerawomen, script writers, and editors from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and their legacies in contemporary cinema. We begin with Soviet cinema of the 1920s, examining the often downplayed role of women editors in the formation of a unique montage culture in both feature and documentary film. We then focus our attention on the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in the postwar period, which witnessed a growth of women directors and the entry of women into other professions in the film industry. Finally, we examine the legacies of women’s cinematic contributions in contemporary film from Russia and Central and Eastern Europe. Central to this course is the exploration of Marxist feminism as a possible theoretical backdrop against which we can understand women’s cinema in the region, as well as the “western” feminist concepts of écriture feminine and cinécriture. Examining specific works of art, we will ask: is women’s cinematic writing as a gendered vision of reality possible within a Marxist political-theoretical framework, which sees women’s liberation as part of the broader class struggle? Does women’s “writing” in cinema of the region exist in spite of an overarching framework that minimizes gender differences in favor of the universal human? What did women directors, cinematographers, editors, etc., from this geographic region contribute to cinematic techniques and the language of film? Does women’s cinema of the socialist period continue to inform the film industry in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe today?

This course will study Russian Internet as a unique phenomenon with its own cultural status, history, ethical codes, and even grammatical rules. Students will get acquainted with the major literary and scholarly magazines, fiction and non-fiction libraries, and collections of films and music. They will learn to navigate Russian sites and identify reliable information sources. We will discuss the issues of intellectual property and censorship on the Internet, and study the peculiarities of Russian social networks, Internet memes and myths. The course is taught in Russian and expects students to do substantial research of Russian web-space.

This course will address problems of culture-specific aspects in translation -- translation of idioms,associative layers in literary texts, allusions of all sorts, both linguo-cultural and political, differences in syntactic structures and types of semantic emphasis, and ways to avoid calques. Students will work on a whole array of texts that, for one reason or another, are considered to be "untranslatable." At the very least, we will try to define what is untranslatable -- i.e., culture- or structure-specific -- about them. This will allow students to learn ways to compensate for the untranslatable and to switch from one cultural code to the other, from the original language to the target one. The course will require in-class translation as well as a final project presented to the whole class, different for every student and based on his/her respective personal interest or area of concentration. Both in-class translations and these projects are to be graded. The final project is worth 50% of the grade. Most of the discussion will be in Russian, but the projects are, naturally, bilingual.

At the end of the nineteenth century Russian literature and society went through a great upheaval that culminated in the Communist Revolution. Powerful ideas launched by Marx, Schopenhauer, Freud, Nietzsche reverberated through Russian society and literature and challenged long etablished political and moral values. Russian society became increasingly fragmented amid the political unrest and moral uncertainty. In this tumultuos and heady period from the 1890s to the early 1930s literature and art again expressed the rebellious search for meaning. The individual faced a brave new world of contingency that increasingly collided with Bolshevik doctrine. By the early 1930s Soviet authorities brought Russian modernism to an end. How did the understanding of the world fundamentally change? What role did the Russian tradition play? What new values did modernist literature offer? How did modernism resonate in the new Soviet space of the 1920s? How did ideology and literature coexist? These moments in Russian Modernism will be explored through the works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, the great poets of the Silver Age, Gorky, Biely (Petersburg), works of popular fiction, Pilniak (The Naked Year), and Gladkov (Cement). Conducted in English. Fulfills the HUMW-II requirement.

This course examines the development of the short story, the dominant prose genre of the twentieth-century. Texts are selected from every decade of the century. Students are to keep a journal, organize class discussions, and write a research paper based on one story not read in class. Conducted in Russian.

The main purpose of the course is to determine if terrorism and Islam in Russia are connected at all. If not, what relevance does each, as it appears in Imperial Russia, have for your life today? Terrorism and Islam were confused long before Sept. 11, 2001, and not merely in the USA. The purpose of this course is to distinguish between the two, as well as to explore some reasons why the gross confusion between them has appeared, in one particular culture -- not American but, this time, Imperial Russian. Terrorism will be traced as a purely Russian phenomenon, originating in Bakunin's thought, taking deep root in Nechaev and Nechaevism, and then ascribed to the mentality of several minorities to scapegoat them. The roots of this scapegoating are largely spiritual, and therefore particularly difficult to understand in our current, politically-oriented mentality. Yet it is imperative to address the spiritual nature of terrorism as well. Essentially, it is a type of murder not sanctioned by the army, the state, or the penitentiary system in a society. This murder usually aims at political goals but does not stem from the governing political system. Such a view of murder as a spiritual aberration of morality is usually best addressed by fiction, especially spiritually oriented. We will read Dostoevsky's Demons, with special references to Crime and Punishment, to understand this mentality. We will then explore the spiritual roots of terrorism in the 1905 Russian Revolution and in Andrey Bely's Petersburg. After this, we will read excerpts from Dmitry Merezhkovsky's Alexander I and from the Decembrists. From then on, we will move to the Russian Empire's treatment of Islam within itself, as well as in its conquest politics. To address these problems, we will read: Pushkin's Travels to Arzerum, Mikhail Lermontov's "Bela"and "Princess Mary," both from his Hero of our Time, and Leo Tolstoy's Hadji-Murad and his short story "Prisoner of the Caucasus." If time permits, we will also watch Bodrov's film "Prisoner of the Mountains," based on Tolstoy's story but transposed upon the 1990s Russo-Chechen war. (Taught in English. Satisfies the HALC requirement.)

This course studies cinematic traditions of Russia and Eastern Europe. It explores the cultural, historical, and social contexts that have shaped these regions' distinctive cinematic narratives. Students will analyze iconic films, directors, and movements, gaining insights into the diverse techniques and storytelling styles

Murder is the ultimate transgression, the crime that cannot be redressed. In this course, we will examine how Russian novelists conceive of murder. What motivates us to murder? Honor, hatred, jealousy, politics? Is murder ever justified? Who is the murderer, and what is his/her fate? We will discover how some of Russia’s most remarkable writers have answered these questions.

This course investigates experimental art and literature of Russia and Eastern Europe in the first decades of the 20th century in a comparative context. Our aim is to examine the commonalities among the diverse radical groups that identified themselves with “the avant-garde,” to consider how avant-garde artists defined their place in society and negotiated their relationship to politics, and to reflect on the position of experimental artists from this geographic region within broader European trends. We ask: what distinguishes the avant-garde from other modernist trends? Can we speak of a unified international movement known as “the avant-garde,” or are there many avant-gardes? What is the relationship of the avant-garde to nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism? Where does the avant-garde stand in relation to socialist revolution and leftist politics? We consider these and other questions by interrogating the avant-garde’s relationship to the past, history, and tradition, and by examining the techniques, media, and genres that were pervasive throughout its different factions. For the final students have the option to pursue a creative project that engages avant-garde techniques and strategies studied in the course.

This course is team–taught in English to bring together history and fiction as a way to understand Russian terrorism. The topic in terms of both Poetics and History and Political thought entails a two-fold benefit for students. On the one hand, the students will see the historical background for mental and ethical premises all-too relevant today for the world as a whole, audacious as these premises may seem or be. On the other hand, given the importance of the history of Terrorism as ideology, they will also learn what Poetics, the specifically artistic discourse, can convey about a political mentality which they may otherwise find not merely unbearable but incomprehensible even in purely mental terms. Fiction, after all, is capable to convey the ineffable and to model the incomprehensible as no other discourse can.

Vladimir Nabokov was among the most gifted prose stylists in the English language. With the publication of Lolita, he became one of its most scandalous writers. He was also a master of self-presentation and literary celebrity. His carefully crafted biography, including his early Russian works, his bilingualism, and his rejection of contemporary politics, made him into the essential literary celebrity of mid-century America. This course reads Nabokov's greatest works—from both his Russian and English periods—alongside the creation of his authorial persona in order to understand how this master manipulator used literature, politics, and the media to make himself into one of the twentieth century's definitive figures.

The course will examine the relationship between history and personal lives of individuals as portrayed in Russian literature of the 19th and 20th century. Does History determine how human fates and relationships play out, or does a person have the freedom to chart the course of his or her life and relationships? We will examine approaches to these questions in the works of the nineteenth-century authors Alexander Herzen and LeoTolstoy, and their twentieth-century successor, Boris Pasternak. In addition to three novels that focus on love stories drawn against an increasingly “thick” historical background (Who Is to Blame?, Anna Karenina, Doctor Zhivago), we will read parts of Herzen’s autobiography, My Past and Thoughts, which presents the story of both his public and personal life.

The course is in English. We will read a series of Russian books where Orthodox subtexts --liturgical or theological determine and motivate the plot ot the characters' behavior and mentality, or all of these. Ideally, we will take the works where this motivation would be imperative--i.e., where, without it, a particular plot or character's behavior would look like total nonsense without this factor. This will involve Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, Leskov's Sealed Angel, Tolstoy's "Three Elders," Chekhov's "Holy Night," "The Student," and "The Bishop," as well as Platonov's Foundation Pit and, adequate translations permitting selections from Pasternak's poetry from Doctor Zhivago, at least two Orthodoxy related poems by Mandel'shtam (on the Eucharist and on Petersburg St. Isaac's Cathedral), and possibly at least a poem or two by Timur Kibirov (well translated into English by our former student Hannah Schneider). Our goal is to see when Orthodox mentality and spirituality seem indispensable for the Russian culture. The purest experiment allowing us to see that is when all other motivation for the plot or/and poetics in Russian literary texts seems to be absent. Consequently, we shall examine the role of nonsense and the absurd in Russian pious discourse.

This course will cover late-Soviet and post-Soviet literature and visual culture embedded in social and institutional contexts

This course examines the art of protest in Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia, from the 19th century to the present day. Artists and writers from this region have a long history of fighting against and working within repressive conditions. In response to censorship, political imprisonment, authoritarianism, and other threats, they have developed unique strategies of survival and protest, as well as a conceptual apparatus around the idea of the "power of the powerless." As we examine performance art, literature, music, visual art (from painting to film), and other art forms that have challenged repressive institutions, we consider art’s unique potential for political protest. To prompt comparative inquiry across media and historical times, the course is organized into several thematic sections: war, censorship, patriarchy, capitalism, prisons & camps, and historical amnesia. As we work to unearth a theory and practice of artistic protest across time and space, we also examine the specific historical circumstances of each artwork.

The 20th century brought violent upheavals to Russia and East Europe in both culture and politics. This course covers the broad sweep of 20th-century Russian culture. We examine great works of prose, poetry and other arts that bore witness to the seismic changes of the last hundred years, starting before the Bolshevik Revolution and continuing up to the post-Soviet era. We interrogate the relationship between political and cultural revolution, asking whether revolutionary literature can truly remake human nature, whether literary resistance can bring down a hated regime, and what lessons can be drawn from this volatile history that might be applied to our increasingly unstable world today.

The course will address various ways the poetics of Russian Fiction address prejudices-- head on. First, they are put in the foreground as the motifs in the plots-- e.g., motifs of racism or othering/ de-othering the Other in Russia's imperial Islamic invasions and government of territories; the motif of objectifying prisoners or women, or pre-assigning gender roles, or that of religious sects and schismatics in Russia, the later motif, including anti-Semitism, although it involves aspects of racism and cultural / linguistic Xenophobia as well. Mostly, the examples we will examine will come from 19th c but we shall possibly address a couple of stories from 20th c and perhaps from 21st c (Makanin, Shalamov), including films.

At the turn of the 20th century Russian culture witnessed unprecedented experimentation in romantic relationships and sex. Many cultural figures of the modernist period rejected procreative sex and traditional gender roles in favor of less individualist and individualizing alternatives, capable of uniting humanity into a tight-knit collective. This course examines literature and art created between 1889 and 1930, with an eye to how these cultural products view romantic and erotic relationships and construct more ideal alternatives. Alongside novellas, poems, plays, essays, visual and performance art, students will consider writers’ and artists’ personal biographies through the lens of zhiznetvorchestvo, or modeling life as a work of art. Central to our pursuit will be the exploration of romantic and sexual problems, “pathologies,” and possibilities, as they are depicted in the artistic works. Taught in Russian

At the turn of the 20th century, Russian culture witnessed unprecedented experimentation in regard to romantic and erotic relationships, gender identity, and expression. Many cultural figures rejected procreative sex, traditional gender roles, and identities in favor of less individualistic, less binary alternatives, with the hope of uniting humanity into a tight-knit collective and transforming the world. In this course, we will consider not only the Russian modernists' idealistic projections of future alternatives but also the problematic pathologies that went hand in hand with their erotic utopias. This course examines literature, visual and performance art created between 1889 and 1930, with a focus on romantic relationships, sex, gender, and how these issues bridge pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russian culture. Alongside novellas, poems, essays, and visual art, students consider writers’ and artists’ personal biographies through the lens of "zhiznetvorchestvo" or the modeling of life as a work of art. Taught in English.

Tolstoy was relentless in pursuing the truth and raising crucial questions about life: how can one be an authentic self? How can one live a meaningful life? How should I/ an individual relate to others/ community? What is the purpose of art? What is the Good? As one of the great Realist writers of the 19thc, he created memorable characters that confront such questions as they face daunting moments in their lives. In this course we will consider the intricacies of his characters and literary works, and how one can reconcile his championing clarity and simplicity with the complexity of his literary texts and his views on life. We will examine these issues in several works: an early story from the Sevastopol Tales, his great novel War and Peace, “The Death of Ivan Il’ich,” his play The Power of Darkness, “Hadji Murat,” and his booklet What is Art?.

This course examines highlights in modern Croatian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, and Ukrainian literatures. It focuses on literature in both its literary and historical contexts, in particular on questions of national identity defined in relation to East and West. The course will cover salient texts of Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, the post-World War II period, and the post-Soviet period. This course is taught in English, and all materials are in English translation. Students will read and discuss selected poems, short stories, plays, and novels by leading authors such as Adam Mickiewicz, Taras Shevchenko, Karel Mácha, Ivo Andri?, Czes?aw Mi?osz, Lina Kostenko, Václav Havel, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš, Yuri Andrukhovych, Wis?awa Szymborska, Tadeusz Konwicki, Dubravka Ugreši?, and others. (Taught in English; satisfies the HUMW-II requirement.)

This course explores the topic of family in its various ramifications as it figures in two English and two Russian novels of the 19th century: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) will be paired with Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872), and George Elliot’s Middlemarch (1872), with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877). Family is a focal point where individual lives intersect to form a small community, which further intersects with the wider community and society at large. This intermediate position explains the centrality of family as a theme in the European novel of the 19th century. (Taught in English; satisfies the HUMW-II requirement.)

Issues raised in the present Russian-Ukrainian conflict were formed in the imperial age when the Russian empire confronted questions about its own identity and its relationship to its various subjects. Ukrainians posed a particularly vexing problem for the imperial narrative. Where exactly did they fit? What of their origins and place in old Kyivan Rus? Were Russians and Ukrainians two separate peoples? Was the Cossack Hetmanate a state or just a loose polity? Was the language merely a dialect of Russian? What should their role be in the empire? This course will examine the debates on these and related issues by considering the cultural production of the intelligentsia (writers, scholars, artists) that gave voice and image to their national narratives.

The course "Transgression and Resistance" studies the most recent literature and films created in the post-Soviet space: we will read and analyze short stories (Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin, Jurij Bujda), poems (Maria Stepanova, Elena Fanailova, Roman Osminkin), songs (Psoy Korolenko), as well as non-fiction (Svetlana Aleksievich) and texts created collectively in the Russian segment of the Internet, and discuss how they are rooted in and react to the classical Russian and Soviet traditions. We will focus on various strategies of constructing a new Russian identity on problems of nationality and gender. The course will treat post-Soviet transgressive literature and visual arts as a form of resistance to authoritative aesthetics and political systems and discuss the phenomenon of nostalgia towards the Soviet Union and its deconstruction in contemporary culture.

A close reading of the text and analysis of the themes and structure of Pushkin's novel in verse, accompanied by the study of its historical, cultural, and literary contexts. Primary text will be read in Russian (with parallel English text available), and class discussions will be conducted primarily in Russian. Students will write several brief assignments in Russian and a longer research paper in English. (Taught in Russian. Satisfies the HALC requirement.)

Chekhov addressed a number of fundamental questions: how does our subjective consciousness grasp the world? what certainty do we have about what we hold to be true? how can one be an authentic self? The approach and the stylistic devices he developed so radically departed from the literary norms of his time that critics and readers were often baffled. In his stories and dramas his characters engage but don’t seem to arrive at any significant resolution. And his plays of non-action were among the first to break with the principles of drama set forth since the time of Aristotle. This course will examine what answers Chekhov provided and how he can be considered a Modernist author not only in terms of what he has to say abut also how he says it.

This course (taught in English) explores the Four Great Murder Novels, and, time permitting, -The Adolescent-. How can all the "-isms" Dostoevsky's characters and narrators so passionately proclaim agree with what the writer himself regarded as a system of absolute values? All the explanations provided by all the "-isms" and everyone's passionately personal "-ism" are true but insufficient. What is sufficient is unpronouceable. This course teaches us how Dostoevesky encodes unshakeable values in conspicuous omissions. He develops a powerful narrative and structural technique which treats precisely what matters most as unmentionable. This allows him to be tolerant toward a multitutde of voices without losing his own, as well as to move the forbidden from the realm of external law to that of the inner voice of one's conscience. There is a mid-term examination and a final paper. (Conducted in English; no knowledge of the Russian language required. Satisfies the Humanities II requirement.)

The course is designed to give students the experience of reading one of the greatest novels in Russian and world literature in the original, of going deep into its poetic structure and coming to an understanding of the text's message(s). To achieve this goal we will be doing close reading of passages and studying the literary, philosophical, and historical contexts of the novel. Course taught in Russian.

In Russian culture, poetic quotes and associations provide basic units of meaning and reference. This course teaches students about Russia's poetic tradition and its formative role in Russian culture, by training them in the skills of interpreting poetry through structural and intertextual analysis. The former entails patterns in syntax and prosody, while the latter addresses mutual quotation and allusions. In order to impart to American students the cultural relevance of Russian poetry, we shall start with later poets and examine how and why they use references to the earlier ones. Taught in Russian.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837) is widely known as the founding father of Russian literature. Since Pushkin was first and foremost a poet, and therefore almost impossible to translate, he is much less known outside of Russia. This course gives you a chance to find out for yourself why Russians have called Pushkin “the Sun of Russian Poetry” and “our everything.” We will read and analyze a selection of lyrics, two narrative poems (verse tales: The Gypsies and The Bronze Horseman), one or two of Little Tragedies (verse drama), and one or two of The Tales of Belkin (stories in prose). We will consider Pushkin’s work in the context of European Romanticsm and Realism. This is an upper-level Russian course, taught primarily in Russian. It is open to fourth-year students of Russian and to all those capable of reading and discussing the book in Russian. This class satisfies a Russian Major elective requirement, the HALC (Humanities: Arts, Literature, and Culture) requirement, and the Diversity (Global) requirement.

This course explores contemporary women’s writing in Eastern Europe after the fall of Communism, with particular attention to reception of Western feminism and critique of capitalist cultural markets. By reading and discussing short stories, poetry, novels, and essays from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, and the Baltic countries from the time of transition, students engage with the complexity of attitudes and feelings that accompanied the political, economic and social changes in the region: far from an unambiguously positive embrace of democracy and free markets, many writers from the region express deep anxiety about the loss of a culturally distinct past and a shared multi-ethnic and multi-national culture, alongside more positive feelings of relief at the apparent dissolution of East-West borders and boundaries, of limitations on freedom of expression, etc. The syllabus includes four Nobel Prize-winning authors and creative assignments that help students better understand literary form. Taught in English

The course examines images of women in works of Russian literature from the 1790s through 1870s. Works of fiction and autobiography by male and female authors are discussed in conjunction with influential discursive statements on the role of women and the "woman question" by writers and literary critics. Conducted in Russian.

This course, taught in English, introduces stories by major Russian writers starting with Karamzin, then sampling the 19th Century Classics— ranging from Pushkin, Gogol Lermontov, Tolstoy, Leskov, and, bridging into the 20th century, Chekhov. In the twentieth Century, it comprises authors ranging from Kharms, Platonov, Bulgakov, and Zoshchenko, through Nabokov and then, the Post-Soviet Pelevin and Sorokin, thus bridging into the 21st century and issues of burning relevance today, both poetic and political.

In 19th-century Russian culture and literature, it became fairly clear, fairly early on, that the truly heroic would be all women. Men had two options left — to be villains or wimps, sometimes with a rather attractive Hamlet-like allure. As a result, Russian literature made one thing clear for Western literature as well: the Romantic Hero was in fact an anti-hero, inherently. This discovery and clarification had huge implications for Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries but also for the West. The course covers material pertaining to Russian Romanticism, nascent Realism, and the way both stem from a pattern suggested by Russian Sentimentalism — in Karamzin’s “Poor Liza”. This translates to, roughly, the following authors — mostly but not exclusively their prose: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Odoevsky, and Griboedov. Most likely works to be covered are Pushkin’s Belkin’s Tales and ‘The Queen of Spades’, Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Petersburg Tales, V.F. Odoevsky’s “Opere dei Cavalleri Giambattista Piranesi” and The Salamander, and Griboedov’s “Woe from Wit”, or “Trouble with Reason” (depending on the translation you use). An in-class midterm essay and a final paper are required, as well as many questions to be answered on close readings by email. These and class participation are included in your final grade. As class participation is vital, more than one unexcused absence would automatically lower your grade by 5% per absence. (Taught in English; satisfies the HUMW-II requirement.)

In this course, we will read several works of fiction dating from Russia's 20th century, and a little of the 21st, which attempt to rewrite history, contemporaneous, or nearly so, with the time the works were written. Paradoxically, the way historical facts are distorted in these works seems to reveal something about their true nature or implications. A Midterm essay and a Final paper are required, plus also a framework for class participation, to be discussed during the first class. Course taught in English.

The course will explore two types of narrative in twentieth-century Russia: prison camp literature and the literature of exile. According to Varlam Shalamov, a concentration camp is hell. Alexander Solzhenitsyn tends to see it as purgatory, a place where one can find humanity even under inhuman circumstances. We will briefly study the history of the Soviet GULAG, including the difference between the criminal and political camps, and will concentrate on a close reading of literary works by Russian writers - both those who have been inmates, and those who have been guards. The course readings include works by Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky, Dovlatov, Brodsky, Pelevin, and Makanin. We will also watch and analyze films (e.g., The Prisoner of the Mountains). Classes are conducted mainly in the form of discussions. Conducted in English. Fulfills the HUMW-II requirement.

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Russian writers came increasingly to believe that their world rested on shifting sands. They conveyed their sense of unease on the pages of some of the greatest novels ever written, employing the Russian family as an exemplar of Russian society as a whole and uncovering the fault lines that would ultimately lead to the dissolution of both. This course focuses specifically on Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," Dostoevsky's "Brothers Karamazov," and Bely's "Petersburg." (Taught in English; satisfies the HUMW-II requirement.)

Unlike my Orthodoxy as Subtext, a course dedicated to Russian Prose and taught in Eng;ish, this course is taught in Russian and explores poetic texts only. Unlike my other poetry courses in Russian, this one examines exclusively religious—Biblical and liturgical—motifs or/and subtexts in Russian Poetry. Otherwise, different content and concentration aside, the format of the course is very similar to my other poetry courses. We will read, translate, and abanalyze the text with the following important skills and competence required—exploring functions of Russian metrics, grammar, syntax, and other linguistic and structural properties of the Russian Language, for poetic purposes—how the form of the poem is connected to its message. In Poetry, as in Poetics in general, intertextuality is one of such properties. We will address a specific segment of it—the religious one. We start with the Zhivago Poetry Cycle by Pasternak, do a lot of Mandelstam, especially his poems on The Eucharist, Protestantism (including “Bach”), St. Isaac’s Cathedral, the Notre Dame, etc. I will introduce some Symbolist poetry, and should the students be interested, they may explore more of it (especially Vladimir Solovyov), on their own, for the final project. I will also use at least one poem by Nikolai Gumilev (“The Descendants of Cain”). We shall also read Pushkin, Tiutchev, and some unexpected sources—like Velimir Khlebnikov’s “Slums,” as well as many much more recent poets, e.g., Timur Kibirov, Olga Rozhanskaia, Henri Volokhonsky, etc. My students from my more general course on Russian Poetry may recognize some authors, as well as the general tools and approaches to poetry I will teach, but the choice of poems and the thematic concentration will be exclusively on religion, especially Christianity, especially when, culturally, the poet would address the topic in an unexpected way. The course entails constant class participation, as we will do the textual analysis in class, every time, of a new poem. So everyone much prepare every assignment, and that is tough—although shorter, poetic texts are usually much more intense than prose, especially in a foreign language. Class participation is therefore worth 40% of the grade. There will be an in-class Midterm, with the analysis of a poem given by the professor (20% of the final grade), and a final project—a paper analyzing a poem of the student’s choice, with specifically religious intertextuality and system of allusions (30% of the final grade). The final project will have a comnponent of an oral presentation in Russian (10% of the final grade). The analysis in the Midterm and the Final written assignments/ papers may be done in English, but the text analyzed must be in the original Russian. A paper written in Russian will receive an additional bonus to the grade but only if its sophistication is the same level as the one on which the student would write in English. The course itself is taught in Russian.

Chekhov addressed a number of fundamental questions: how does our subjective consciousness grasp the world? what certainty do we have about what we hold to be true? how can one be an authentic self? The approach and the stylistic devices he developed so radically departed from the literary norms of his time that critics and readers were often baffled. In his stories and dramas his characters engage but don’t seem to arrive at any significant resolution. And his plays of non-action were among the first to break with the principles of drama set forth since the time of Aristotle. This course will examine what answers Chekhov provided and how he can be considered a Modernist author not only in terms of what he has to say abut also how he says it. The course is taught in Russian

This course will examine Chekhov's prose and his dramas. It will focus on the literary context of late nineteenth-century Russian literature, the development of Chekhov's poetics and his influence on Russian prose and theater. Conducted in Russian.

In this course we will examine a variety of Russian literary portrayals of madness. It has become a critical commonplace that Russian literature often expresses unpalatable truths that cannot be addressed in other fora. We will therefore look beyond the “clinical” manifestations of insanity in each work and examine madness as a metaphor for social, moral, and political pathologies. This course is designed to: introduce upper-level students to a broad range of Russian writers; to familiarize them with the notion of inter-texts; to ground their interpretations in close readings of texts; and to strengthen their writing skills.

"Master and Margarita" is widely considered the major Russian novel of the twentieth century. It is complex and intriguing: Bulgakov’s version of the New Testament is also a picaresque adventure of the Devil and his whimsical gang in the Soviet Moscow of the thirties, a beautiful romance, and a story about the fate of a writer in a bureaucratic totalitarian society. What is a greater evil: the romantic Devil or triumphant mediocrity – a member of the Writers’ Union? – asks Bulgakov. The novel was not published for thirty years, and in the sixties it was secretly passed in handwritten copies; to get it for one night was exceptional luck. In this course, we will close-read the novel in Russian, analyze its various sources: literary, philosophical, musical and theatrical, and will attempt to solve some of its numerous mysteries. The classes are conducted mainly in Russian, in the form of discussions.

Tutorial: Russian

Tutorial: Russian

This independent study will focus on Nabokov's longest and most difficult text, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969). Begun under the working title The Texture of Time, Nabokov's late masterpiece contains his most sustained engagement with the philosophy of time, a recurrent theme throughout his work. For this reason, we will read philosophical works on time from writers such as Henri Bergson, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, and Paul Ricoeur, alongside Nabokov's novel and important secondary works.

Tutorial: Senior Honors Thesis

Tutorial: Russian

Tutorial: Russian