Courses

Last offered Fall 2020

This course develops all five skills--listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and culture--for students who have completed at least one year of college-level Russian. Coursework includes a systematic review of Russian grammar, as well as an examination of a variety of authentic materials from Russian and Soviet culture, current events, and daily life. Intermediate students will concentrate on expanding their vocabulary, while more advanced students will focus on reading and writing about unabridged texts in Russian. Students who complete the yearlong sequence of RUSS 151 and RUSS 152 should be well prepared to undertake study abroad in Russia and are encouraged to do so. Each year this course is custom-designed to meet the needs of those students who enroll, so that both intermediate and advanced students can benefit from taking RUSS 151 and/or RUSS 152 more than once, which may be done with the permission of the instructor. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2021

This course develops all five skills--listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and culture--for students who have completed at least one year of college-level Russian. Coursework includes a systematic review of Russian grammar, as well as an examination of a variety of authentic materials from Russian and Soviet culture, current events, and daily life. Intermediate students will concentrate on expanding their vocabulary, while more advanced students will focus on reading and writing about unabridged texts in Russian. Students who complete the yearlong sequence of RUSS 151 and RUSS 152 should be well prepared to undertake study abroad in Russia and are encouraged to do so. Each year this course is custom-designed to meet the needs of those students who enroll, so that both intermediate and advanced students can benefit from taking RUSS 151 and/or RUSS 152 more than once, which may be done with the permission of the instructor. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2021

This course will introduce you to some of the most influential literary texts of the nineteenth-century Russian literature that became moral, ideological, and aesthetic touchstones for all later periods of Russian culture. We will study the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov with attention to their thematic and aesthetic preoccupations, socio-political and philosophical contributions, and historical contexts. Topics of particular interest include Russia's national and imperial identity; Russia's experiment in Westernization; questions of religion and science; the fluctuating meanings of social class and rebellion. By the end of this course, you will have acquired a basic understanding of the history, aesthetics, and politics of nineteenth-century Russian literary culture, as well as its broader legacy. You will have strengthened your reading and writing skills through training to read primary texts closely and analytically. All readings are in English. [ more ]

RUSS 210 TUT Tolstoy: The Major Novels

Last offered Spring 2012

This tutorial will focus on Lev Tolstoy's four novelistic masterpieces--War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Resurrection, and Hadji Murat--placing them in their appropriate historical, social, and philosophical context. For each week of class, students will read a significant portion of a novel by Tolstoy, as well as a selection of secondary literature taken from those works that inspired the author, reactions that arose at the time of the novel's publication, and scholarship that seeks to explain the power and enduring significance of these novels. Students will meet with the professor in pairs, with one student writing a five-page paper for each class session and the other student providing a critique of the paper. For those students without Russian language skills, all works will be read in English translation. Those students who have completed at least three years of college-level Russian may take the course in Russian. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2019

Since Vladimir Putin's rise to power, the media has highlighted events in Russia that at first glance resemble oddly sexualized jokes. At the same time that the Kremlin has reinstated authoritarian policy reminiscent of the Soviet Union, the Western press has chronicled Putin's topless vacations in Siberia, protests by the feminist collectives Pussy Riot and Femen, a 2011 ban on women's lacy underwear, federal legislation from 2013 prohibiting "homosexual" propaganda, and a 2017 court decision that outlawed a meme of Putin as a "gay clown." This course examines the Putin regime's ongoing attempts to police gender expression and private sexual behavior, as well as how Russian citizens' performance of gender and sexuality has changed in the past twenty years. We will consider gender and sexuality as distinctive features of Putinism, which have contributed to a biopolitical turn in official policy and inspired resistance and protest among Russian feminists and queers.All readings will be in English, and all films with have English subtitles. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2021

The purpose of this course is to explore the unexpected recent confluence of the American and Russian far-right movements, among advocates for authoritarianism in both countries who have traditionally understood the 'other' superpower to be an implacable enemy. How have nationalist movements in the United States come to see the Russian Federation as a vanguard for 'whiteness' and traditional masculinity in European identity, overturning the perception of Russia as a racial Other that was prevalent among American conservatives during the Cold War? What are the affinities between the imperial and openly patriarchal aspirations of Putinism and the goals of American religious Reconstructionism, with its interpretation of the Confederacy as a God-given model for racial separatism and gender complementarianism? We will discuss repressive historical legacies and homophobia in both countries, devoting particular attention to debates about protest art and the removal of monuments, and to movements that situate themselves in opposition to neoliberal forms of ethno-nationalism. [ more ]

Last offered Fall 2020

The same course as RUSS 151 but for students at the advanced level. See RUSS 151/152 for full course description. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2021

The same course as RUSS 152 but for students at the advanced level. See RUSS 151/152 for full course description. [ more ]

RUSS 275 SEM Russian and Soviet Cinema

Last offered Spring 2019

In this course, we will survey over a hundred years of Russian and Soviet film to explore how cinema has reflected and, at times, created the country's most important historical events and cultural myths. We will pay close attention to Russian filmmakers' varied reactions to Hollywood cinema, as well as to the lively body of cinema theory that these reactions generated. Our survey will begin in the pre-Revolutionary era and include representative films from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalinism and World War II, the Thaw and Stagnation, Glasnost, and the Putin era. In addition to studying films by auteur filmmakers, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Aleksandr Sokurov, we will watch movies made for the masses, which have helped to form Russians' understanding of their country and themselves. All readings will be in English and all films will be viewed with English subtitles [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2022

Prepare to alternately fall in love and lock horns with this illustrious nineteenth-century Russian author. He is worth it. Whether searching for the meaning of life, interrogating what it means to love another human being or struggling with religious faith, Tolstoy was a busy, busy man and a prolific writer. This course will examine his life and major works in the broader context of Western intellectual history. Readings will include his two great novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina, as well as a number of shorter works, such as The Cossacks and The Death of Ivan Ilych. We will also consider some of Tolstoy's aesthetic and religious writing as we examine his constant, rich, and at times surprising development as one of the greatest artists and thinkers of the 19th-century. [ more ]

RUSS 331 TUT The Brothers Karamazov

Last offered Spring 2019

Widely hailed as one of the greatest novels ever written, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov contains a series of enigmas, not the least of which is precisely who murdered the Karamazov father. In addition to exploring the shared guilt of all four of the brothers Karamazov in the crime of patricide, Dostoevsky poses the most probing questions of his day: Are families tied together merely by blood or by deeper spiritual bonds? Is religious faith possible in an age of reason, science, and technology? Can man's earthly laws ever carry out divine justice? Is humanity prepared to bear the burden of responsibility that comes with freedom? This tutorial will spend an entire semester exploring Dostoevsky's masterwork, and we will read a variety of secondary sources alongside The Brothers Karamazov, including history, philosophy, and literary theory. Our goal will be to understand Dostoevsky's answers to these so-called "accursed questions" through the unique artistic form of The Brothers Karamazov. [ more ]

RUSS 343 SEM Spectacles on His Nose and Autumn on his Heart: The Oeuvre of Isaac Babel

Last offered Fall 2013

Known alternately as "master of the short story" and "Russian Maupassant," Isaac Babel was not only one of the most celebrated and intriguing authors of early Soviet Russia, but also a cultural figure of profound national and international significance. For a number of reasons (political, aesthetic, professional, ethical) Babel was not prolific and this will allow us to read almost all of his creative output, something we rarely get to do in the course of a single semester. Babel's writing is extremely varied--it includes sketches, journalistic prose, short stories, plays, movie scripts, one unfinished novel--and richly intertextual. This will afford us the opportunity to read the work of some of his contemporaries and predecessors, from both Russia and abroad, with whom he fashioned brilliant literary conversations, among them Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov, Sholem Aleichem, and Ivan Turgenev. All course readings will be in translation, but students are highly encouraged to read in the original (Russian, French, Yiddish) whenever possible. [ more ]

Last offered Spring 2021

War and Peace and Anna Karenina, which Henry James famously described as "baggy monsters," are works that are immediately identified with Leo Tolstoy, a giant of nineteenth-century Russian literature. But Tolstoy wrote so much more! From short works of adult fiction, to stories for children, pedagogical essays, political tracts, aesthetic treatises, and philosophical musings. He produced variously and prodigiously throughout his life and that's not even counting his fascinating diaries and personal correspondence. Our course readings will probe this exceptional variety with the goal of understanding the scope of Tolstoy's thinking in greater depth. All readings and discussion will be in Russian. [ more ]