Courses
(also see )
NOTE: Some literature courses are offered in English as well as the original language. For courses offered in English, please see courses cross-listed as LIT. All other courses are taught in the original language and require proficiency in that language. Russian language tutoring is available in the Language Lab.
Russian for Heritage Speakers
The Russian Department offers a special independent study course for heritage speakers of Russian. Learn more about this course.
RUSS 111 - First-Year Russian I
Intensive treatment of elementary Russian grammar, with special emphasis on pronunciation, basic conversational ability, and thorough coverage of contrastive English-Russian grammar. Grammar instruction is supplemented with Russian-language cultural materials. Classroom activities include poetry readings, working with music videos, film, and internet clips
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
RUSS 112 - First-Year Russian II
Intensive treatment of elementary Russian grammar, with special emphasis on pronunciation, basic conversational ability, and thorough coverage of contrastive English-Russian grammar. Grammar instruction is supplemented with Russian-language cultural materials. Classroom activities include poetry readings, working with music videos, film and internet clips.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
RUSS 211 - Second-Year Russian I
Readings, systematic grammar review, verbal drill, and writing of simple prose. The course is conducted in Russian and is intended for students interested in active use of the language.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 212 - Second-Year Russian II
Readings, systematic grammar review, verbal drill, and writing of simple prose. The course is conducted in Russian and is intended for students interested in active use of the language.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 266 - Russian Short Fiction
Intended for lower-division students, this course is devoted to close readings of short stories and novellas by such nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century writers as Karamzin, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Teffi, Bunin, Babel, Kharms, Nabokov, Kharitonov, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and Tolstaya. Our approach is twofold. First, we attempt "open" readings, taking our texts as representatives of a single tradition in which later works are engaged in a dialogue with their predecessors. Second, we use the readings as test cases for a variety of critical approaches. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit. Meets English departmental requirement for 200-level genre courses.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 267 - Love and Death in Twentieth-Century Russian Short Story
This course examines the art of the short story through the lens of two fundamental existential themes: love and death. We will read works of short fiction by twentieth century Russian and Russophone writers such as Tolstoy, Chekhov, Bunin, Gorky, Babel, Zamiatin, Platonov, Nabokov, Shalamov, Ginzburg, Iskander, Aitmatov, Tolstaya, Petrushevskaya, Pelevin, and others. In this course, students will investigate the genre of short story and its specific poetics, learn aboutRussian and Russophone literary traditions, and develop criticalskillsnecessary for analyzing works of literary fiction. The workload includes extensive reading, class presentations, and regular writing of critical essays. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 300 - Advanced Russian: Language, Style, and Culture
This course is designed to meet the needs of students striving to reach an advanced level of competency in reading, speaking, listening, and writing in Russian. The course expands and deepens the student's understanding of expressive nuances of Russian through a study of select lexical, morphological, syntactical, and rhetorical features and through an examination of their contextual usage in appropriate target texts-fiction, journalism, and mass media-and corresponding cultural matrices. Case study materials include both classic and contemporary texts as well as classic Soviet films. Course assignments include reading and translation, grammar review, structured composition exercises, and oral presentations. The course is conducted in Russian.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 301 - Advanced Maintenance Russian Through Poetry
In this advanced Russian language course, we will read, translate and discuss Russian poetry - from classical (Derzhavin, Pushkin, Tiutchev, and others) to modernist (Blok, Annensky, Kuzmin, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Mandelshtam, Pasternak, and others) and postmodernist (Prigov, Rubinshtein, Stepanova, and others). Our primary focus will be on the language of poetry, its grammar and vocabulary, as well as the essential features of Russian versification. Additionally, we will discuss the poets' themes, their artistic methods, and their lives. Students will write several short essays, both "responses" and critical ones, in Russian. This course is recommended to both advanced learners of Russian (RUSS 220 or the instructor's permission is a prerequisite) and heritage speakers of Russian, whose language needs will be addressed specifically. The course is conducted in Russian, and it satisfies the advanced Russian language requirement for Russian majors.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 325 - Soviet World Literature: International, Multinational, National
Maxim Gorky famously declared in 1934 that "Soviet literature is not merely a literature of the Russian language." This course is an exploration of the diverse literary and cultural forms that flourished under the Soviet state projects of multinationalism and internationalism. We will study the lives and works of writers from Soviet republics in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Siberia, with particular attention to questions of national identity and tensions between the promises of Soviet liberation and the realities of oppression and state violence. Additionally, we will consider works by "fellow travelers" who spent time in the Soviet Union, such as travelogues by Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde, and novels by Nâzım Hikmet (Turkey) and Ismail Kadare (Albania). Additional theoretical readings, scholarly literature, and historical documents -from political speeches to memoirs and manifestos -will help us critique ideologies of multinationalism and internationalism, and reflect on the ways ethnic, national, and class-based identities were imagined, codified, enacted, and enforced by institutions and individuals in the attempt to build a Soviet world. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 364 - Robots, Aliens, Progressors: East European Science Fiction and Beyond
Did you know that the word "robot" was invented by the Czech author Karel Čapek or that the most exciting and provocative science fiction in the twentieth century was written in Polish and Russian? This and so much more is what you will learn in this course. We'll begin with the groundbreaking speculative works composed in the 1920s in Eastern and Central Europe and proceed with the renaissance of science fiction in Poland and the Soviet Union (Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia) after World War II. The bulk of the course will be devoted to the works of the Polish Jewish author Stanislaw Lem, arguably the most important science fiction mind of the twentieth century, and his disciples in the Soviet Union, such as the Strugatsky brothers, Gennady Gor, Ariadna Gromova, Ilya Varshavsky, Boris Shtern and others. We'll investigate how they envisioned the fiascos of contact with the interplanetary forces, the potential and failures of AI, the possibilities of parallel universes, and so much more. We'll also uncover the links between their works and American sci-fi, by Philip K. Dick and others.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 367 - Envisioning Modernity: Central Asia and the Caucasus through Literature, Film, and the Arts
This course introduces students to a part of the world frequently stereotyped by outsiders as "frozen in time," and "shrouded in mystery," yet which has long been at the center of discourses of modernity and their attendant political, intellectual, and cultural projects. Through a survey of 20th and 21st-century works by leading cultural figures from Central Asia and the Caucasus, we will examine modernity as an idea depicted in, and conveyed through literature and the visual arts, as well as cutting-edge media forms like the periodical press, filmmaking, photography, television, and social media. Secondary readings on the history of Central Asia and the Caucasus will enable us to examine the connections between visions of modernity, forms of anticolonial resistance, and ideologically-driven constructions of nation, ethnicity, and race. Students will develop a working knowledge of the cultures, languages, and environments of present-day Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 368 - Modern Queer Cultures in Russia, Eastern and Central Europe
The course is a comparative study of the fraught history of LGBTQ+ literature and art in Russia and East-Central Europe-a subject urgent and timely in light of the current resurgence of anti-queer oppression worldwide. Examining queer voices from modern Russia, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Serbia, students will be introduced to the uniqueness of queer experiences in the region, often so divergent from the history of sexuality in the West. Drawing on Western theory (Butler, Kosofsky Sedgwick, Stryker, Halberstam, Ahmed), we will seek to problematize and enrich the dominant Western paradigms by examining diverse local discourses on gender and sexuality (Vasily Rozanov, Alexandra Kollontai, Yevgeny Kharitonov and others). The course materials include classics of queer art across various media-literary works by Mikhail Kuzmin, Olha Kobylianska, Marina Tsvetaeva, Witold Gombrowicz; opera by Karol Szymanowski; visual art by Toyen and El Kazovsky; film by Sergei Parajanov-discussed in their historical contexts. While our chief focus will be on the twentieth century, with a brief look at the nineteenth-century prehistory, we will also consider the queer culture of the present, such as the poetry of Slava Mogutin, the drag performance and activism of Merlinka and the cinema of Rustam Khamdamov. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 370 - Literary Translation
The seminar will combine a study of translation theory with a workshop format, providing space for each student to develop a sustained translation project over the course of the semester. Our work will comprise weekly discussions of ongoing drafts, peer review and multiple revisions. Students may work on a genre of their choice, although particular emphasis will be placed on translations of poetry. In addition to creative practice, students will be introduced to the foundations of translation studies as a major field of humanistic enquiry. We will discuss select works of translation theory (Benjamin, Jakobson, Steiner, Spivak, Apter), examine salient case-studies in the history of translation (Beckett's Rimbaud, Celan's Mandelstam, Spicer's Lorca, Carson's Sappho) and read reflections by distinguished practitioners of the art (Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Lydia Davis). Bridging theory and praxis, we will seek both to resist the idea of the literary work as trapped in its monolingual nature and also to attend to the limits of "world literature"as a utopian project of modernity. Other assignments include oral presentations, a brief final essay and a conference report. All readings and discussions are in English.An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 371 - Origins of Russian Literature: From Medieval to Romantic
How did Russian literature come into being? This course traces the complex, culturally diverse, and perpetually contested history of the Russian literary tradition from the late ninth century to the early nineteenth century. Although our primary focus will be on written texts produced in Kievan Rus', Muscovy, and the Russian Empire (including chronicles, saints' lives, autobiographies, travelogues, drama, poetry, and prose), we will also analyze oral tales, religious art and architecture, and a variety of ceremonial and decorative objects. Class discussions, readings, short written assignments, presentations, quizzes, and a multistep research paper are designed to provide students with contextual knowledge and systematic training in close reading and guided critical strategies. Upon successful completion of this course, students will have a working knowledge of the major cultural, historical, and intellectual currents that paved the way to the nineteenth century "Golden Age" of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 372 - Russian Literature: Realism
This course is an introduction to the major writers, movements, genres, and works of Russian literature from the early nineteenth century to the immediate prerevolutionary era. With a primary focus on the emergence of realism and its associated thematics, this course includes works of fiction by Turgenev, Goncharov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, and Chekhov, as well as letters and essays by their contemporaries. Secondary readings will offer additional contextual information and critical perspectives on these works and their role in the continued development of a national canon. All readings will be in English translation, and class meetings will be conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 373 - Twentieth-Century Russian Literature
Analytical survey of Russian literary prose from proto- to high modernism to postmodernism, examining how it evolved through the twentieth century amidst historical upheavals - revolutions, displacements, persecutions, wars. How did Russian literature continue to renew itself under these pressures? One answer lies in the transformations of the modern self as constructed by various writers. Some created autonomous selves within imaginary worlds, while for others a self's value remained grounded in social reality. We will explore these contrasting perspectives by investigating how Russian fiction either drew on or distanced itself from non-fiction. The course traces the development of twentieth-century Russian literature through a range of genres: novels, short stories, prose poems, memoirs, autobiographies, essays, anecdotes - using a variety of critical approaches. Readings include the prose of Chekhov, Sologub, Guro, Tsvetaeva, Babel, Kharms, L. Ginzburg, Shalamov, Nabokov, Trifonov, Petrushevskaya, Sorokin and Alexievich.All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 374 - Russian Modernism
This course explores the rich legacy of modernist literature in Russia as a dynamic field of aesthetic innovation, social experimentation, and historical reflection across the long twentieth century. We will approach Russian modernism as an evolving organism, with both a prehistory and an afterlife. We will review the roots of the modernist movement in the late work of nineteenth-century realists (Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov) and trace the departure from that tradition in the aestheticism and politicisation of Russian Symbolists (Sologub, Bely). Next, we will focus on the stylistic innovations of Acmeists (Akhmatova, Mandelstam) and Futurists (Khlebnikov, Pasternak) as twin responses to the contradictions of fin-de-siècle utopianism culminating in the October Revolution. We will also consider the paradox of avant-garde literature in a post-revolutionary era through the Oberiu group and Andrei Platonov. Special attention will be given to the fates of Russian modernism in interwar émigré culture (Nabokov, Tsvetaeva). Finally, we will survey the repercussions of modernist experimentation in the writings of late and post-Soviet authors. Conducted in English.An additional weekly session will be scheduledfor students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 378 - Late Tolstoy: From Anna Karenina to a Religious Teaching
The course explores the later period of Leo Tolstoy's career, from Anna Karenina (1870s) to his late fictional works, such as "The Death of Ivan Ilych" (1886) and "Hadji Murat" (1904), and his aesthetic, ethical, theological, as well as political writings. We will study Tolstoy's transformation from a fiction writer to a moral theorist and religious activist as we pay special attention to Tolstoy's doctrine of nonviolence and his antiwar writings. Apart from a study of Tolstoy's poetics and ideology, we will engage a number of cultural contexts for his works: Russian political and intellectual history, aesthetic and artistic developments in late nineteenth-century Russia, Tolstoy's role and reputation in Russian society, his impact on anti-racist, anticolonial, and pacifist movements around the world. The workload includes extensive reading, oral presentations, and several writing assignments. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 379 - The City and Its Myths: St. Petersburg
This course explores the cultural representations of an unusual city: in just over three centuries, St. Petersburg has changed from a whimsical project of Russian autocracy to the actual seat of imperial power to the "alternative"metropolis associated with both conservatism and dissent. In addition, the city's liminal position on the Baltic has long been interpreted as embodying the contradictions of Western modernity on Russian soil. We will examine how this eccentric, hybrid space gave rise to the myth of an "unreal"city suspended between culture and nature. We will trace the crystallisation of the St. Petersburg myth in Russian literary classics and follow its radical transformation in the twentieth century, when its master-trope of resisting annihilation became an existential reality. Readings include works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Blok, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Vaginov, Kharms, Bitov, Brodsky, Elena Shvarts, Polina Barskova and Aleksandra Tsibulia, along with travel writing (de Custine, Serge), documentary prose (L. Ginzburg) and urban lore. We will also watch and analyze films by Sergei Eisenstein, Alexander Sokurov, Alexei Uchitel, Sergei Loznitsa and the Necrorealist group. Conducted in English.An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a non-English language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 381 - Fyodor Dostoevsky: Novelist, Nationalist, Prisoner, Prophet
This course examines the life, work, and legacy of Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881). Our central focus will be the reading and analysis of his classic works - the novellaThe Double (1846), andthe novelsNotes from the House of the Dead (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880), as well as his articles, speeches, and autobiographical documents. We will also study Dostoevsky's far-reaching influence on movements such as postwar Existentialism, auteur cinema, and contemporary postmodernist and metamodernist fiction. Along the way we will grapple with the complexities of a writer Albert Camus called "the real 19th century prophet," whose youthful commitment to social justice and personal experiences of poverty, incarceration, addiction, and chronic illness led to transcendent visions of redemptive suffering and universal love, yet whose xenophobic and imperialist articulations of Russia's identity and destiny continue to fuel nationalist ideology in Russia today. The course workload consists of reading, discussion, presentations, and a variety of writing assignments. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 386 - Tolstoy and War
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was a dedicated military man in his youth, yet in his later years he went on to become the world's leading pacifist. Tolstoy gained early literary fame withTheSebastopol Sketches(1855), documenting his experience of the Crimean War, and later explored Russia's imperialist conquests of the Caucasus inThe Cossacks(1863) andHadjiMurat(1896-1904). Most significantly, he examined the psychological, political, and philosophical dimensions of war in his great epic novelWar and Peace(1867), set during the Napoleonic wars. In this course, we will examine Tolstoy's treatments of war by readingWar and Peacein its entirety, as well as his other major fiction and nonfiction texts concerning war, military, and militarism. In our investigation of Tolstoy's poetics, philosophy, and politics, we will pay particular attention to the relevance of his insights for today's world, which is still scarred by war and imperialist conquest. We will also discuss Tolstoy's formidable contribution to the cause of peaceful social change. The workload includes extensive reading, oral presentations, and several writing assignments. All readings and discussions are in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 388 - From Lenin to Putin: Soviet Experience and its Aftermath through Film, Literature, & Human Document
This course explores Soviet culture and its aftermath in Russia through the prism of human experience asencoded in films as well as works of literature and personal documents, such as diaries and memoirs. The question of the role played by cinema in both organizing and reflecting human experience will be of particular interest to us. We will also study how lives and identities of ordinary people were affected by the revolutions, utopian ideology, totalitarian government, political terror, and partial modernization. The themes include the reforms of calendar; organization of industrial time; city and house planning; communal living; pedagogical undertakings (the concept of New Men and Women); regulating family, sexuality, and gender; living through terror and forms of resistance to it; the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire as lived experience. We will conclude with surveying main social, cultural, and political developments in post-Soviet Russia. Our primary sources will include both artistic masterpieces (films by Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Oleksandr Dovzhenko, Larisa Shepitko, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Sokurov, Aleksei Balabanov, Sergei Loznitsaand others; writings by Nadezhda Teffi, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Bulgakov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lidiya Ginzburg, Svetlana Alexievichand others) as well as testimonial and personal writings. We will also read critical and historical texts. All readings and discussions will be in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 392 - Nuclear Literatures: A Comparative Approach
This course is a comparative study of the nuclear theme in several literary traditions which are usually treated separately: Japanese literature on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Soviet and post-Soviet reactions to the ecological disasters at Chernobyl, Semipalatinsk, and other sites; American literature of the Cold War; and contemporary literary and artistic reactions to the 2011 disaster at Fukushima. We will also examine the interrelationship of political rhetoric, scientific language, and poetic language in the way nuclear power is imagined, implemented, experienced, and resisted. Our comparative approach will be informed by readings from the schools of postcolonialism, eco-criticism, and critical Indigenous theory. We will focus not only on the Atomic Age's legacy of human and environmental devastation, but also on the geopolitical, existential, and epistemological questions raised by the threat of nuclear accidents and warfare. Conducted in English. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for students taking the course for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).
RUSS 436 - Sergei Eisenstein's Film Art: Decadence, Revolution, and the Mechanics of Ecstasy
This course offers an in-depth exploration of the oeuvre of Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948), the Soviet film director and theorist widely regarded as one of the most influential creative figures of the twentieth century. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) revolutionized cinema as an art form, and his other landmark films-Strike (1925), October (1927), Old and New (1929), ¡Que viva México! (1932), Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Ivan the Terrible (1944-45)-made profound and original contributions to the evolution of film language and aesthetics. As a theorist, Eisenstein articulated the principles of montage editing and investigated the psychological and emotional responses of viewers and readers to art. His intellectual legacy also includes works in sexual theory, psychology, literary analysis, and philosophy, brilliant film scripts, as well as witty and stylistically experimental autobiographical writings.Thousands of his drawings-often ironic and provocatively obscene-explore the intertwined nature of artistic, sexual, and religious ecstasy, which he conceived as a unified phenomenon. We will examine Eisenstein's work across multiple contexts: cinematic, aesthetic, literary, and political. The course aims to survey and analyze Eisenstein's body of work-including his films, theoretical writings, prose, and drawings-within the broader cultural, political,and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. Students will investigate his contribution to the development of cinema, refine their skills in cinematic analysis and critical writing, and engage with key debates in film history and theory. Coursework includes regular film screenings,extensive reading, writing assignments, and in-class presentations. All readings and discussionsare inEnglish. An additional weekly session will be scheduled for studentstaking thecourse for Russian credit.
- Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
- Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
- Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).