Russian

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

Grammar, reading, composition, and conversation.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2101 or the equivalent. Drill practice in small groups. Reading, composition, and grammar review.

Prerequisites: RUSS UN2102 or the equivalent and the instructors permission. Enrollment limited. Recommended for students who wish to improve their active command of Russian. Emphasis on conversation and composition. Reading and discussion of selected texts and videotapes. Lectures. Papers and oral reports required. Conducted entirely in Russian.

The revolutionary period (1905-1938) in Russia was not only one of extreme social upheaval but also of exceptional creativity. Established ideas about individuality and collectivity, about how to depict reality, about language, gender, authority, and violence, were all thrown open to radical questioning. Out of this chaos came ideas about literature and film (just for example) which have shaped Western thought on these subjects to this day. In this course we will study a variety of media and genres (poetry, manifestos, film, painting, photomontage, the novel, theoretical essays) in an effort to gain a deep understanding of this complex and fascinating period in Russian cultural history.

Two epic novels, Tolstoys War and Peace and Dostoevskys The Brothers Karamazov, will be read along with selected shorter works. Other works by Tolstoy include his early Sebastopol Sketches, which changed the way war is represented in literature; Confession, which describes his spiritual crisis; the late stories Kreutzer Sonata and Hadji Murad; and essays on capital punishment and a visit to a slaughterhouse. Other works by Dostoevsky include his fictionalized account of life in Siberian prison camp, The House of the Dead; Notes from the Underground, his philosophical novella on free will, determinism, and love; A Gentle Creature, a short story on the same themes; and selected essays from Diary of a Writer. The focus will be on close reading of the texts. Our aim will be to develop strategies for appreciating the structure and form, the powerful ideas, the engaging storylines, and the human interest in the writings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. No knowledge of Russian is required.

Prerequisites: RUSS V3430 or the instructors permission. This course is designed to help students who speak Russian at home, but have no or limited reading and writing skills to develop literary skills in Russian. THIS COURSE, TAKEN WITH RUSS V3430, MEET A TWO YEAR FOREIGN LANGUAGE REQUIREMENT. Conducted in Russian.

This content-based language course is designed for students who have completed the equivalent of four semesters of college-level Russian. In this course, contemporary Russian films are used as both an authentic linguistic environment for language skills development and a rich cultural text. Students will analyze a variety of themes, including identity, morality, generational tension, and post-Soviet transformation through guided viewing, discussion, analytical writing, and presentations. Students will work with films representing different genres, e.g., romantic urban comedy, sports historical drama, and psychological social realism. Through close viewing of selected scenes, guided discussions, analytical writing, and structured vocabulary development, students will refine their listening comprehension of authentic speech, expand their active vocabulary, and strengthen control of complex grammatical structures including case system, aspect, participles, subordination, hypothesis, and discourse connectors. The course is conducted entirely in Russian.

This course will explore the works of Nadezhda Teffi, a brilliant Russian writer and satirist whose voice is usually excluded from the "grand" canon of Russian literature. We will work with her short stories, which represent various aspects of pre-revolutionary and émigré cultural and social experiences, such as childhood, folklore, revolution, emigration, and life abroad. We will also explore her satirical play, The Woman's Question. By drawing students’ attention to Teffi’s literary poetics, original forms of satire and humor, and representation of social types and gender issues, this course will expand students’ understanding of Russian literature and introduce them to the culture of emigration. Another reason to study Teffi closely is that her archive is held at the Bakhmeteff Archive at Columbia. Students will have the opportunity to explore the archive in connection with the course material.

All readings and written assignments are in Russian. Classes are conducted entirely in Russian.

 

Prerequisites: four years of college Russian or the equivalent. Workshop in literary translation from Russian into English focusing on the practical problems of the craft. Each student submits a translation of a literary text for group study and criticism. The aim is to produce translations of publishable quality.

From Prince Valdimir’s Rus’ to the Post-Soviet Russia of Vladimir Putin, religion has remained a key factor in the making and remaking of Russian polity and culture. This course will explore how Orthodox Christianity—whether privileged or persecuted—came to dominate the Russian religious scene and shape Russian institutions, discourses, and lived experiences. Students will draw from a variety of primary and secondary sources—chronicles, saints’ lives, travel narratives, memoirs, letters, legal documents, icons and other ritual objects, films and fictional texts, as well as a large body of scholarly works and contemporary media materials—to examine how Russia’s Orthodox past and its rewriting into competing “histories” have been used over time as “legacies” shaping the present and the future.

Transformations of a literary canon always reflect historical shifts and upheavals. Today, in the context of Russia’s aggressive war against Ukraine and weaponization of culture as a political tool, the Russian literary canon has been problematized and revised. Through our course we want to offer a broadened version of Russian-language literary culture focusing on those texts of 19th  and 20th  cc. that have often remained outside university curricula overshadowed by the pillars of the canon. The goal of the course is to attract students to works and literary experiments that have not been smoothly incorporated into “the Russian canon” – Soviet, Western, or post-Soviet alike. Along with close readings of these texts, we also want to highlight and practice theoretical approaches to textual analysis that typically are sidelined in literary courses and consider how working with a broader canon challenges our conceptions of literary movements, devices, and genres.