Russian

2018-19

103 Russian Literacy for Russian Speakers

This course is designed for students with substantial fluency in speaking and comprehending conversational Russian but limited training in writing and reading the language. We will focus on building the students’ literacy in written Russian through readings in classical literary texts and contemporary media; analysis and application of key grammatical categories; and frequent writing exercises that will build the students’ ability to express their thoughts and interpret artifacts of Russian culture. 

Admission with consent of the instructor.  Limited to 12 students. Omitted 2018-19. Professor Wolfson.

122 Love and Death: the Big Questions of Russian Literature

Who is to blame? What is to be done? How can we love, and how should we die? In an age when such larger-than-life questions animated urgent debates about self and society, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and other writers whose famous shorter works we’ll read in this course reinvented the idea of literature itself. Political terrorism and non-violent resistance, women’s rights and imperial expansion, quests for social justice and personal happiness:  as nineteenth-century Russian authors explored the cultural anxieties provoked by these challenges of modernity, their ambition was not to mirror experience but to transform it by interpreting its deepest secrets. This is an introduction to the daring, contradictory visions of life and art that forever changed how we do things with words. No familiarity with Russian history or culture expected. All readings in English.

Spring semester. Professor Wolfson.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

123 Century of Catastrophe: Soviet and Contemporary Russia in Literature and Film

Russia was launched on a unique path by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917: it was intended to become the first Communist society in history. The Cultural Revolution that followed sought to remake institutions and even persons in the name of realizing a classless society. This utopian project came up against the actual history of the twentieth century not just in Russia but internationally: world wars, the collapse of empires, and the victory of “capitalism” over “communism.”  Much of the best Russian literature and film of the twentieth century addresses the tensions of this historical period. We will trace these tensions in landmark texts, grouping them around particular moments of catastrophic change – the Revolution, the Civil War, the “internationalizing” of non-Russian peoples, collectivization and famine, Stalin’s purges, World War II and the siege of Leningrad, urbanization, and the collapse of the Soviet empire. We will consider, among other texts, Esther Shub’s “The Fall of the Romanovs,” Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Lydia Ginzburg’s Blockade Diary, Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark,” and the installation art of Ilya Kabakov. All readings and discussion in English. No familiarity with Russian history and culture is assumed. Three meetings per week.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Ciepiela.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Spring 2013, Spring 2016, Spring 2018, Spring 2020

130 Russian Empire in Eurasia

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2018, Spring 2022, Fall 2024

201 Second-Year Russian I

This course stresses vocabulary building and continued development of speaking and listening skills. Active command of Russian grammar is steadily increased. Readings from authentic materials in fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Brief composition assignments. Five meetings per week, including a conversation hour and a drill session.

Requisite: RUSS 102 or the equivalent. This will ordinarily be the appropriate course placement for students with two to three years of high school Russian. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Kunichika.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024

216 Creativity and Revolution

(Offered as RUSS 216 and EUST 216) The three decades from 1890 through 1920 marked a time when Russia’s future was being radically reimagined, politically and culturally. We will study creative revolution in the arts—in literature, painting, theater and dance, and the new medium of cinema—as participating in shaping a national vision, even as Russian artists absorbed and engaged with international models. We also will study reverberations of this period in later Soviet culture, such as absurdist theater, underground art and the poetic revival of the 60s and 70s. This course is taught in English and no familiarity with Russian language and culture is assumed.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Ciepiela.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2017

217 Strange Russian Writers: Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Nabokov, et al

A course that examines the stories and novels of rebels, deviants, dissidents, loners, and losers in some of the weirdest fictions in Russian literature. The writers, most of whom imagine themselves to be every bit as bizarre as their heroes, include from the nineteenth century: Gogol (“Viy,” “Diary of a Madman,” “Ivan Shponka and His Aunt,” “The Nose,” “The Overcoat”); Dostoevsky (“The Double,” “A Gentle Creature,” “Bobok,” “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man”); Tolstoy (“The Kreutzer Sonata,” “Father Sergius”), and from the twentieth century: Olesha (Envy); Platonov (The Foundation Pit); Kharms’ (Stories); Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita); Nabokov (The Eye, Despair); Erofeev (Moscow Circles); Pelevin (“The Yellow Arrow”). Our goal will be less to construct a canon of strangeness than to consider closely how estranged women, men, animals, and objects become the center of narrative attention and, in doing so, reflect the writer Tatyana Tolstaya’s claim that “Russia is broader and more diverse, stranger and more contradictory than any idea of it. It resists all theories about what makes it tick, confounds all the paths to its possible transformation.” All readings in English translation.

Not open to first-year students. Limited to 35 students. Fall semester. Professor Rabinowitz.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2008, Fall 2009, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2020, Spring 2022

225 Nabokov’s Art and Terrors

(Offered as RUSS 225 and ENGL 315) This course undertakes a sustained examination of the works of Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). Drawing on the literary masterpieces of Nabokov’s Russian and English periods, we seek to gain a critical appreciation of his literary art and the cultural and aesthetic contexts from which they emerged. Throughout the course, we will consider his abiding themes such as the complex relationship between art and life, and between the poet, the state, and society; the narration of the experience of time; metafiction, its possibilities and constraints; bad art; the experience of exile; and the privileged position of art and aesthetics. The latter are variously inflected as refuge, asylum, or a space of revolt, as well as what enables the artist to counter, but also to inflict, cruelty. The course will also situate Nabokov’s work with the currents of literary modernism; to that end, readings are also drawn from such figures as Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Our access into these themes and the author’s narrative art will be through attentive reading, itself a preeminent theme of Nabokov’s work. No familiarity with Russian history or culture expected. All readings in English.

Fall semester. Professor Kunichika.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2013, Spring 2016, Fall 2018, Fall 2020, January 2022, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Fall 2023

227 Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels remain relevant to readers across the globe for their daring critique of modernity. A journalist himself, he took his material from the newspapers – stories of crime, corruption, poverty, addiction, terrorism, politics – and mined it for existential meaning. He also drew on his own difficult experience as a political prisoner who spent a decade in Siberia, an eternal debtor, and an incurable epileptic. In this course we will study Dostoevsky’s fiction and journalistic writings, alongside reactions to his work from international thinkers (Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche), writers (D.H. Lawrence, Richard Wright, David Foster Wallace) and filmmakers (Alexander Sokurov, Robert Bresson). We will begin with several early works (“Notes from Underground,” “The Double,” House of the Dead) whose concerns persist and develop in the novels that are the focus of the course: Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. All readings and discussion in English.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Ciepiela.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2017, Fall 2019, Fall 2023, Spring 2025

234 The Soviet Experience

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the great utopian experiment of the twentieth century–a radical attempt to reorganize society in accordance with rational principles–came to an end. This course explores the dramatic history of that experiment from the perspective of those whose lives were deeply affected by the social upheavals it brought about. We begin by examining early visions of the new social order and attempts to restructure the living practices of Soviet citizens by reshaping the concepts of time, space, family, and, ultimately, redefining the meaning of being human. We then look at how “the new human being” of the 1920s is transformed into the “new Soviet person” of the Stalinist society, focusing on the central cultural and ideological myths of Stalinism and their place in everyday life, especially as they relate to the experience of state terror and war. Finally, we investigate the notion of “life after Stalin,” and consider the role of already-familiar utopian motifs in the development of post-Stalinist and post-Soviet ways of imagining self, culture, and society. The course uses a variety of materials–from primary documents, public or official (architectural and theatrical designs, political propaganda, transcripts of trials, government meetings, and interrogations) and intimate (diaries and letters), to works of art (novels, films, stage productions, paintings), documentary accounts (on film and in print), and contemporary scholarship. No previous knowledge of Soviet or Russian history or culture is required; the course is conducted in English, and all readings are in translation.

Fall semester. Professor Wolfson.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2010, Fall 2013, Fall 2018

235 Stalin and Stalinism

Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2021, Fall 2023

237 Soviet Union During the Cold War

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2012, Fall 2015, Fall 2018, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

240 The Last Russian Revolution: State and Society from the Late Soviet Period to the Present

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2017, Spring 2020, Fall 2022

241 Russian and Soviet Film

(Offered as RUSS 241 and FAMS 329) Lenin proclaimed, famously, that cinema was "the most important art of all" for the new Soviet republic. This course explores the dramatic rise of Russian film to state-sanctioned prominence and the complex role it came to play in modern Russia's cultural history. We examine the radical experiments of visionary filmmakers who invented the language of film art (Bauer, Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko); the self-conscious masterpieces of auteurs who probed the limits of that language (Tarkovsky, Paradzhanov, Sokurov); and the surprising ways in which films ostensibly designed to enact cultural and social myths of power, history, and national identity in the end reshaped their makers, their audiences, and the myths themselves. No familiarity with of Russian history or culture expected.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Wolfson.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2014, Fall 2016

242 Revolutions in Theater

Each bold innovation in twentieth-century theater sought to redefine in its own way the very idea of theatricality, and so to reshape the relationship between text and performance, experience and interpretation, social reality and cultural tradition. The conviction that a director can, as Peter Brook put it, “take any empty space and call it a bare stage” led the great reformers whose theoretical writings and theatrical practices are examined in this course to conflicting visions of theater’s role in the esthetic, cultural and social revolutions of their times. We explore the experimental esthetics of Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, Heiner Müller, and Robert Wilson—and each director’s radical reinventions of theater as naturalistic, realistic, symbolist, constructivist, expressionist, epic, cruel, poor, deathlike, painterly, and holy.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Wolfson.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2017

245 Sergei Eisenstein's Cinema and Thought

(Offered as RUSS 245 and FAMS 357) This course focuses on Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), whose seminal works in the history and theory of cinema are the subject of our sustained examination. As Eisenstein postulated in 1939, “the method of cinema, when fully comprehended, will enable us to reveal an understanding of the method of art in general.” In our effort to comprehend his work and enduring relevance, we will consider Eisenstein’s stylistics through attentive viewing of his key films: Strike, Battleship Potemkin, October, Old and New, the never completed ¡Que Viva México!, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible. Along with examining their formal features and rich historical and ideological contexts, we will also consider Eisenstein’s theoretical texts on cinema and culture, attending in particular to his theories of montage, method, and his writings on the histories of literature and art. The course aims to situate his work within the broad aesthetic, philosophical, and political currents of his time, which he reflected upon in his work, and to which he, a quintessential modernist, made his distinctive and influential contributions. No familiarity with Russian history or culture expected.  All readings in English.

Spring Semester. Professor Kunichika.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2014, Fall 2016, Spring 2021, Fall 2022

251 1917–2017: One Hundred Years in the Story of Labor

In this course, we consider the century that lay between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the present day by focusing on labor. We reconstruct how labor and work have been represented in primarily Russian and Soviet literature and film, while drawing comparisons from American and European cultural sources. We will consider the Revolution as a historical phenomenon, examining central texts in which its ambitions and significance were contested. We then consider chapters in the on-going career of labor from the 1920s to the present-day. We examine the seminal statements of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky; the groundbreaking films of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein; and the enduring literary works of Andrei Platonov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others. Alongside the Russian texts, we will read or screen works by John Steinbeck, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, and Eugene O’Neil. Throughout, we will be guided by several questions and concerns: how does an artistic work represent labor and conceive its value? What is the nature of work? How is intellectual labor understood in relation to others forms of labor? How are bodies configured by different labor processes? And, lastly, what might this history tell us about the present state and challenge of labor and social inequity at the centennial of the Revolution? All readings in English.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Kunichika.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Fall 2017

252 Russia and the Representation of Race

(Offered as RUSS 252, BLST 292 [D] and FAMS 352) This course focuses on the modes by which race has been represented in Russian and Soviet culture. We approach this topic in two ways: first, we examine how Russian and Soviet culture grappled with questions of race, focusing on episodes in the representation of minority peoples throughout the empire and the Soviet Union; secondly, we consider how Russian and Soviet culture served as a mirror in which minorities from other countries saw their experiences partially reflected or as a source from which they found models to articulate their own experience of race. These two concerns guide us through the course as we study such works as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground as it enters into dialogue with Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man and Leonid Tsypkin’s Summer in Baden Baden; the representation of Central Asia by such figures as Langston Hughes and Andrei Platonov; the appeal of the Soviet Union to Western intellectuals, in particular African-American thinkers and writers, from W.E.B. Du Bois, Hughes, and Claude McKay; Alexander Pushkin and the question of his “blackness” and universality; the cinematic representation of minorities in the films of Dziga Vertov and Vsevolod Pudovkin. We will draw our critical theoretical models from Homi Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Patricia Hall Collins, Johannes Fabian, Stuart Hall, and Mary Louise Pratt, among others.

Omitted 2018-19. Professor Kunichika.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2024

253 Americans Writing Russia, 100 Years On

(Offered as HIST 253, POSC 253, and RUSS 253) For decades Moscow was the quintessential posting for any American correspondent with ambition. The magazines, the papers, the radio, and then the television networks sent their best to live and work in what were usually trying conditions, to try to conjure for the American media consumer a likeness of a country as fascinating as it was feared. The correspondents succeeded and failed with some regularity. Take John Reed, whose Ten Days That Shook the World, a series of dispatches on the 1917 revolution, has landed on both “best” and “worst” book lists. We will begin with Reed and go on to Walter Duranty, who earned a Pulitzer Prize for a report that has since been proved false. We will proceed to look at the work of journalists who sought (or didn’t seek) ways to work around Soviet censorship and those who have been fortunate enough to work without a censor. We will focus more closely on American coverage of post-Communist Russia. How well (or poorly) have our correspondents done – and why? What are the practices that expand or limit our ability to learn what happens in Russia? All readings and discussion in English.

Limited to 35 students. Omitted 2018-19. Visiting McCloy Professor Gessen.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2018

254 Fact, Fiction, and the Truth

(Offered as RUSS 254 and ENGL 314) The problem with facts is that they can be unwieldy, unbelievable, and also unknowable. The problem with fiction is that it doesn’t have the veracity of facts. Or does it? It is a commonplace that fiction can be truer than nonfiction. That, in turn, raises the question of what truth is. The Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich has talked about the “emotional truth” of her books, the factual accuracy of which has been questioned. In this class, we will read Alexievich’s work and discuss this criticism - and the less-than-certain boundary between fiction and nonfiction. But before we get to that, we will be reading, side by side, works of fiction and nonfiction about the great tragedies of twentieth-century Russia: the Gulag; the siege of Leningrad; the war in Chechnya; and more. We will also watch several films. Reading closely, we will ask how the narratives and characters in fiction and nonfiction shape our understanding of “what really happened.” We will be reading both Russian and English-language authors, but all readings will be in English. This is a writing-attentive class in which students will be asked to write essays and fiction.

Spring semester. Visiting Professor Gessen.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2019, Spring 2020

301 Third-Year Russian: Studies in Russian Language and Culture I

This course advances skills in reading, understanding, writing, and speaking Russian, with materials from twentieth-century culture. Readings include fiction by Chekhov, Babel, Olesha, Nabokov, and others. Conducted in Russian, with frequent writing and grammar assignments, in-class presentations, and occasional translation exercises. Two seminar-style meetings and one hour-long discussion section per week.

Requisite: RUSS 202 or consent of the instructor. First-year students with strong high school preparation (usually 4 or more years) may be ready for this course. Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Professor Rabinowitz and Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024

302 Third-Year Russian: Studies in Russian Language and Culture II

We will be reading, in the original Russian, works of fiction, poetry and criticism by nineteenth-century authors such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov. Conducted in Russian, with frequent writing and translation assignments.

Requisite: RUSS 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Kunichika.

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

304H Advanced Intermediate Conversation and Composition

A half course designed for intermediate-level students who wish to develop their fluency, pronunciation, oral comprehension, and writing skills. We will study and discuss Russian films of various genres. Two hours per week.

Requisite: RUSS 301 or consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

345 Living the Revolutionary Utopia: Reconfiguring the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union, 1917–1920s

2023-24: Not offered
Other years: Offered in Spring 2015, Fall 2017, Spring 2019, Fall 2024

401 Advanced Studies in Russian Literature and Culture I

The topic changes every year. Taught entirely in Russian. Two class meetings per week.

Fall semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024

490 Special Topics

Independent Reading Course.

Fall and spring semesters. The Department.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Spring 2012, Fall 2012, Spring 2013, Fall 2013, Spring 2014, Fall 2014, Spring 2015, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Fall 2024

498, 499 Senior Departmental Honors

Open to, and required of, seniors writing a thesis.

Spring semester. The Department.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

Russian Language Courses

101 First-Year Russian I

Introduction to the contemporary Russian language, presenting the fundamentals of Russian grammar and syntax. The course helps the student make balanced progress in listening comprehension, speaking, reading, writing, and cultural competence. Five meetings per week. 

Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.

Other years: Offered in Fall 2011, Fall 2012, Fall 2013, Fall 2014, Fall 2015, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024

102 First-Year Russian II

Continuation of RUSS 101.

Requisite: RUSS 101 or equivalent. Limited to 15 students per section. Spring semester.  Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

202 Second-Year Russian II

Continuation of RUSS 201.

Requisite: RUSS 201 or equivalent. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Wolfson.

Other years: Offered in Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2023, Spring 2025

Related Courses

- (Course not offered this year.)FYSE-129 War and Peace (Course not offered this year.)HIST-236 Soviet Union During the Cold War (Course not offered this year.)HIST-445 Living the Revolutionary Utopia: Reconfiguring the Russian Empire as the Soviet Union, 1917–1920s (Course not offered this year.)POSC-301 Terrorism and Revolution: A Case Study of Russia (Course not offered this year.)POSC-380 Kremlin Rising: Russia's Foreign Policy in the 21st Century (Course not offered this year.)