Courses

An introduction to contemporary standard Russian, this course provides opportunities to acquire basic proficiency in all five language skills--listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and culture--through immersion, intensive use of authentic materials, and a strong emphasis on the spoken word in all class activities. Greater emphasis is placed on writing in the second semester. For students who already know some Russian, consultation with the department is required before registering for any Russian language course in the sequence 101 through 252. [ more ]

An introduction to contemporary standard Russian, this course provides opportunities to acquire basic proficiency in all five language skills-listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and culture-through immersion, intensive use of authentic materials, and a strong emphasis on the spoken word in all class activities. Greater emphasis is placed on writing in this semester. For students who already know some Russian, consultation with the department is required before registering for any Russian language course in the sequence 101 through 202. [ more ]

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 Russophone cultures, current events, and daily life. [ more ]

This course continues to develop all five skills--listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and culture--for students who have completed at least three semesters of college-level Russian. Coursework includes the ongoing study of Russian grammar, especially of increasing complexity, as well as an examination of a variety of authentic materials from Russian and Russophone cultures, current events, and daily life. Significant attention will be devoted to vocabulary expansion. Students who complete the yearlong sequence of RUSS 103 and RUSS 104 should be well prepared to undertake study abroad in Russia and are encouraged to do so. [ more ]

This course continues to develop all five skills--conversation, listening comprehension, reading, culture, and writing--for students who have completed at least two years of college-level Russian or the equivalent. Coursework includes the study of higher-level Russian grammar, as well as an examination of a variety of materials-print and other media-from Russian and Russophone cultures, current events, history, and the arts. [ more ]

This course continues to develop all five skills--conversation, listening comprehension, reading, culture, and writing--for students who have completed at least two years of college-level Russian or the equivalent. Coursework includes the study of higher-level Russian grammar, as well as an examination of a variety of materials-print and other media-from Russian and Russophone cultures, current events, history, and the arts. [ more ]

This course surveys history of the twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union through the prism of the cinematic medium. We will watch and analyze key films of this period--films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Tarkovsky, Shepit'ko, Balabanov, and Fedorchenko among others--from a double perspective. On the one hand, we will study the cultural and historical contexts of the Soviet Union and Russia; on the other hand, we will learn the formal and stylistic aspects of the cinematic medium. From this double perspective, we will try to answer the following questions: How does cinema reflect and reframe Russia's and Soviet Union's imperial legacy? How does political "thaws" and "freezes" in the region change cinema as an industry and as an artform? What can we learn from the cinema of this period about the current war that Russia is waging against Ukraine? What kind of history we can learn through analyzing cinematic medium? In other words, we will take cinema neither simply as a direct reflection of state ideology nor as pure aesthetic form or entertainment for the masses. Rather, we will approach the films of this period as audio-visual texts that are rich in historical content and require our informed and attentive interpretation. By the end of this course, you will acquire a wide-ranging knowledge about the twentieth-century Russian and Soviet cinema, history, and culture. Upon successful completion of the course, you will train your eyes to enrich your film watching experience and sharpen your thinking about cinema as a medium to understand culture and history. To do so you will practice analyzing film style, reading scholarly texts critically, and writing about it. [ more ]

Siberia is often framed as an essential part of Russia and a repository of all that is Russian. However, imaginations of Siberia also paint contradictory images of the region: as a heaven or a hell, a wasteland or a breadbasket, a place of freedom or a place of imprisonment, a Russian colony or as the Russian heartland. This course takes as its root that Siberia is not any one thing and not any one place. Rather, Siberia is an idea and set of representations that change over time. In this course, we will analyze and unpack this idea. The course asks: what is Siberia; how did Siberia become so integral to Russia and ideas of Russianness; who defines Siberia; what are the images of Siberia and for whom do they matter; and what do these imaginations of Siberia facilitate and obscure? To answer these questions, we will engage in an interdisciplinary study of Siberia incorporating ethnography, history, film, and literature. The primary goal of the course is to expose students to the various ways Siberia has been imagined, who it has been imagined and represented by, and how these imaginations and representations have lives of their own. In doing so, the course will help students view Russia through its peripheries rather than through Moscow and Saint Petersburg and will enable students to grapple with how "regions" are created. [ more ]

Indigenous movements for land, rights, and cultural preservation have spread to and originated in all corners of the world. However, the global nature of these movements at times obscures ways of being Indigenous in differing contexts. This course analyzes Indigeneity in both the United States and Russia today. Through reading and analyzing ethnography, theory, and literature, it focuses on Indigenous peoples in a comparative context. Rather than prioritizing concern with Indigenous peoples emerging from the US, it attempts to demonstrate what Indigeneity has been in both the United States and Russia and what it is and means today. It asks the following questions: what is Indigeneity and who is Indigenous; how is Indigenous identity constructed and by whom; and what convergences and divergences exist in Indigeneity between the US and Russia or for that matter in other contexts? To help answer these questions, in this course we will grapples with Indigeneity as a social category and other social formations, especially ethnicity, nationality, and race. Topics include: Indigeneity and the State, Revitalization and Resurgence, Indigenous People and Nature Protection, and Hemispheric and Global Indigeneities. [ more ]

This course is about the Caucasus as a real place in the modern imagination - a place often defined by conflict and unfulfilled desires to escape. This ancient and culturally diverse mountain range (medieval Arabic travelers called it "the mountain of languages") marked the boundary between Europe and Asia in antiquity. It was the mythological home of Medea and the place of Prometheus' punishment. Keeping this background in mind, we will begin our study of the Caucasus in the modern imagination by reading 19th century Russian classics (Pushkin, Lermontov, and Tolstoy) in whose works the Caucasus appears as a "frontier" for exploring questions of freedom, oppression, and the boundaries between the strange and familiar. As we set these works in their historical context (i.e., the Russian conquest of the Caucasus and contemporary developments in Western European literature), we will compare them to responses by native Caucasian writers of the period. In particular, we will question the relationship between literature, national awareness, imperialism, and revolt: What role did the Caucasus play in the formation of Russian literature? How did this literature serve the Russian imperial project? How did it express resistance? How did non-Russian authors, whose literary traditions sometimes predated written Russian, imagine their place in these events? To bring our study to bear on the region's present and future, we will also study how the Soviet imagination affected this land and its peoples through representative works of literature and film and how contemporary writers respond to this legacy in the context of Chechnya and Karabakh. All readings will be in English. [ more ]

This course surveys the works of the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose oeuvre represents a life-long quest to uncover the meaning of life. Readings include Dostoevsky's major novels, Crime and Punishment, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov, as well as several shorter works, including Notes from Underground. We will also examine Dostoevsky's journalism, so that we understand how he answers life's most troubling questions in the social and political context of his day, as well as what role artistic representation plays in these answers. All readings will be in English. [ more ]

Among the genres that made nineteenth-century Russian literature famous, perhaps the most elusive is the povest'. Neither short story nor novella, the term povest' describes a type of short fiction, which any author aspiring to literary greatness in nineteenth-century Russia felt obliged to take on. This course surveys representative povesti by Russian writers from Karamazin to Chekhov, offering a survey of nineteenth-century Russian literature through the lens of its short fiction. Along the way, we will read povesti by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. All works will be read in the Russian original. [ more ]

Critics and apologists of Soviet-style socialism alike agree that the Soviet ideology was deeply egalitarian. Putting aside for a moment the very reasonable doubts about how justified this perception actually was, it is still worth asking, how did people who lived in the world in which differences in rank, class, gender or ethnicity were not supposed to matter, make sense of their post-socialist condition, one in which new forms of difference emerged, and old ones assumed greater prominence? And how do these encounters with difference impact current events, such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine, or the lingering tensions between East and West Germans? This tutorial will examine new dilemmas through ethnographic studies and documentary films that aim to capture in real time the process of articulating and grappling with newly discovered divides. We will focus especially closely on Ukraine and Russia, but will also read comparative studies, as well as works on East Germany and Georgia. This course fulfills the DPE requirement by exploring comparatively the ways in which people in different countries made sense of the social, cultural and political heterogeneity of the post-socialist condition. [ more ]

This course is devoted to memories of the USSR. We will focus on memoirs that portray various epochs of Soviet history from different points of view, watch films dealing with the Soviet legacy, and respond to essays that consider the problems of history and myth. In so doing, we will discuss the significance of nostalgia, official vs. unofficial culture, the politics of memory, and the institution of monuments. Much of our course will focus on daily life in the USSR as remembered by the people who lived through it. However, we will also explore the meaning and status of such memories today in former Soviet countries through responses to daily readings, essays, and presentations. Of course, along the way, we will work on improving our spoken and written Russian. [ more ]

Russian senior thesis; this is part of a full-year thesis (493-494). [ more ]

Russian senior thesis; this is part of a full-year thesis (493-494). [ more ]

Russian independent study. [ more ]

Russian independent study. [ more ]