Russian Course Descriptions

Fall. Introduction to spoken and written language. Oral practice emphasized through multimedia exercises and drills.

Spring. Continuation of 101.

Fall or spring. Designed for students with a Russian background who can speak but have difficulty reading and writing. It will help students develop and maintain writing, reading, and speaking skills at the academic level.

Spring. Credit, eight hours. Intensive first-year course. Covers two semesters of Russian. Emphasis on developing oral, written, reading, and comprehension skills.

Fall or spring as needed. Focus on special aspects of Russian culture or language.

Fall, spring, or summer. Credit, two to four semester hours. Prerequisite: none. Intended for graduate students and others who wish to concentrate on learning to read Russian.

Fall. Prerequisite: Russian 102, 110, or consent of instructor. Focus on more advanced grammatical and syntactical constructions both in written and spoken Russian. Supplemented by multimedia exercises and materials.

Spring. Prerequisite: 201 or consent of instructor. Continuation of 201.

Fall or spring. Designed for heritage speakers of Russian; it is sequel to RUSS 103. The emphasis is on improving students' reading and writing skills. It prepares students for further study at the advanced level. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to take RUSS 301, 310, 311, 312, and 313.

Spring. Prerequisite: Russian 201. Theoretical background on, and applied practice with, the sound system of modern standard Russian. In addition, word formation is approached as a key to building one¿s vocabulary in Russian.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. An interdisciplinary course that introduces students to the diversity of Russian culture. Presented against a chronological sequence of Russian history, it covers Orthodoxy, iconography, literature, music, folk beliefs, and customs.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. Survey of the masterpieces of the Golden Age of Russian literature presented against the background of historical, cultural, social, and political developments.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. Designed as a one-semester course to introduce students to the major genres, methodology, and folk agricultural calendar, and the beliefs associated with it. This is a descriptive course, with the specialists and major collections introduced with each genre. The class will meet for three hours each week. Students will be required to write a midterm and a final exam, as well as submit a term paper on a subject of their choosing.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: None. Knowledge of Russian is not required.

Fall. Prerequisite: Russian 202 or consent of instructor. Designed to help students reach a new level of fluency, focusing on vocabulary development and the more complex forms of literary and colloquial Russian.

Fall or spring. Prerequisites: Russian 202 or consent of the instructor. The aim of this course is to acquaint students with the rich tradition of Russian poetry and drama (nineteenth and twentieth century). This course is conducted for the most part in Russian and addresses such issues as the role of poetry and drama in Russian culture. The texts will be read in the original, but some background material may be read in English.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: Russian 202 or consent of instructor. Reading, viewing, and discussing selected materials from classical and contemporary literature, film, and current periodicals.

Fall or spring. Prerequisites: Russian 202 or consent of instructor. The main goal of this course is to expand students' literary vocabulary and develop further the ability to express themselves on both literary and everyday issues by means of the study of a particular Russian author, i.e., Pushkin, Lermontov, Tolstoy, Bulkagov, Pasternak, and more.

Fall or spring. Prerequisites: Russian 202 or consent of instructor. The main goal of this course is to expand students' literary vocabulary and to develop further their ability to express themselves on both literary and everyday issues. This class will emphasize the varying stylistic patterns of different Russian writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will seek to enhance students' understanding of the cultural ambience of Russian literature.

Summer. Credit, eight hours. Prerequisites: Russian 202 or equivalent, and approval of department. Intensive summer study of Russian language and culture in St. Petersburg, Russia. Practical language study, lectures, and tours. See chair of department for application procedure.

The course is designed to develop fluency in spoken Russian as well as enhance writing skills, vocabulary development, and reading and listening comprehension. Using Russian film as a basis for conversation provides students with a wealth of culture-based authentic materials

Spring. Prerequisite: Russian 202 or equivalent. Examines how meaning is expressed in different ways in Russian and English through different grammatical forms, different rules of word order, and different systems of conventional and creative metaphor.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: Russian 202 or equivalent. Introduction to basic oral and written communication skills for trade and business negotiations with Russian-speaking areas of the former Soviet Union.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. The novels of the most famous Russian writer and thinker, who deeply influenced world literature. Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and others. Topics for discussion include: Christianity and atheism, existentialism, the superman, the sources of evil, and freedom and suffering as moral categories.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. The course examines the thought and art of one of Russia's most influential writers. In works such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Tolstoy offers insight into issues still fundamental to us today: the meaning of life and death, moral and social responsibility, and personal identity.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. From tsarist days through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union, Russia has grappled with issues of imagination and identity. These issues find voice in Russian literature, which has moved radically along official and unofficial lines. The course focuses on a battle of realities in twentieth-century Russia, and it examines the powerful dynamics between art and politics. Films, slides, and music accompany texts.

(Same as Art History 369.) Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. Introduction to interdisciplinary study of twentieth-century Russian literature and the visual arts, with focus upon issues of art and politics, time, space, and identity in symbolist, supermatist, constructivist, socialist realist, and post-Soviet "vision". In English.

This class examines several paradigms for understanding Shakespeare's formidable influence in Russian culture: from Bloom's anxiety of influence to Eliot's claim that Shakespeare cannot be a poetic influence to Pasternak's conception of the battle entailed in the transmission of tradition, and then to Mandelstam's vision of influence as a forceful impluse to speech or even a mating call. The plays in question will be carefully discussed in order to understand which of the themes will have the strongest impact and new life in a Russian culture and which are overlooked and downplayed.

Fall or spring. Variable credit. Study of Russian language, literature, or culture, alone or in conjunction with other literary or cultural trends. Topics to be announced in advance. May be repeated for credit when topic varies.

Russia is famous (or notorious) for its wide and sometimes wild experimentation with patterns of erotic behavior, from extreme asceticism to the proclamation of "free love" ("winged eros") in the decade after the Bolshevik Revolution. We will examine some of these "sextremes", as well as the construction of masculinity and femininity in Russian culture and the transformation of gender roles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in the time of revolutions and in places like prisons, exile, and concentration camps. This course will focus mostly on the question of love as presented in the works of Russia's most prominent writers, from Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Vladimir Soloviev, and Chekhov to Bunin, Solzhenitsyn, and Nabokov. We will explore love triangles and squares, jealousy and adultery, virginity and "sexploitation" from psychological, ideological, and philosophical viewpoints. The course will place the rich artistic imagery of Russian prose and poetry in the theoretical and historical contexts provided by outstanding Western thinkers and writers such as Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Freud, Sartre, C. S. Lewis, and R. Barthes.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. This course explores Russian-Jewish intellectual dialogue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the most representative examples of cross-cultural writing, in fiction and nonfiction.

Fall. Prerequisite: Russian 302 or consent of instructor. Short stories and poems of the classic Russian writers from Pushkin and Gogol to Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Social, moral, and aesthetic issues, individual differences in style, and linguistic features of the original Russian texts. Satisfies General Education Requirements postfreshman writing requirement.

Spring. Prerequisite: Russian 401 or consent of instructor. An introduction to the major Russian literary movements, including symbolism, acmeism, futurism, socialist realism, and conceptualism, and to the short representative works of the greatest writers and poets of the twentieth century, such as Nabokov, Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, and Brodsky.

Fall or spring. Reading and discussion of materials from current periodicals, newspapers, and television on history, politics, culture, and science.

Spring. Prerequisite: Russian 415 or consent of instructor. Focus is on political Russian. Readings and discussion of materials from historical and current periodical literature as well as Russian television newscasts, with primary emphasis on current political developments within Russia and problems of Russian foreign policy.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian not required. Major trends of Russian thought: debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers; religious philosophy of Solovyov and Berdiaev; Soviet Marxism; Bakhtin¿s dialogic imagination; existentialism and structuralism; Euroasianism, and evolution of Orthodox thought.

Fall. Prerequisite: Russian 302 or equivalent. Focuses upon key texts and pivotal ideas in Russian thought. Students read the works in Russian and discuss the works in terms of language, style, and concepts, as well as historical, political, and societal dynamics. The course is conducted in Russian.

Fall or spring. Prerequisite: none. Knowledge of Russian is not required. This course offers a comparative perspective on postmodernism in Western and Russian cultures, including parallel examination of principal works in literature, art, and the humanities.

The course is designed to examine in depth a topic of major importance in the development of Russian culture. Although specific themes will vary from year to year, the approach will be interdisciplinary in nature.

Fall. Credit, 4 hours. Open to eligible candidates in their senior year (contact department chair for requirements).

Spring. Credit, 4 hours. Open to eligible candidates in their senior year (contact department chair for requirements).

Fall or spring. Credit, two to four hours per semester. Approval by department is required. Provides students an opportunity to use their Russian language skills outside the classroom in a variety of situations.

Fall or spring. Credit, variable. May be repeated for credit up to a maximum of eight hours. Approval by department is required.

Fall or spring. Credit, variable. May be repeated for credit up to a maximum of eight hours. Approval by department is required.