Slavic Languages and Literature

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Prerequisites: BCRS UN1102 or the equivalent. Readings in Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian literature in the original, with emphasis depending upon the needs of individual students. This course number has been changed to BCRS 2102

A survey of postwar Czech fiction and drama. Knowledge of Czech not necessary. Parallel reading lists available in translation and in the original.

For the nobility of the Russian Empire, daily life for the better part of the 19th century resembled
a carefully choreographed performance. One’s time in public was delicately scripted according
to a stifling web of unspoken expectations, obligatory social ceremony, and mannered
pageantry—all under the watchful, surveilling eyes of the Autocracy (to say nothing of one’s
vicious peers in high society!). The cheap glamours and shameless inauthenticity of high society
life were a common complaint among Russian writers of the 1800s, who bemoaned the falsity
and vanity of their milieu at large. But this pervasive sense of deceit, theatricality, and artifice
was tremendously productive to the Russian literature of the period—as writers developed
devices and vocabulary for interrogating hidden motivations, used new forms and genres to
create and maintain intriguing public personae through their texts, and cleverly deployed their
talents to manipulate the codes that restricted them in order to perform new literary identities
more effectively. An attentive history of Russian literature in the 1800s, then, is in no small part
a history of the ways that Russian writers sought to turn their daily lives into pieces of legible
artistic text, bound by the same constructive principles that their verses and stories often were.

This course dives into the crucible of nineteenth-century Russian thought, and surveys the passionate dissidents, exiles, and iconoclasts that history knows as “the intelligentsia”: elite humanist literati suffused with a near-theological sense of political mission on behalf of the peasantry and against the autocracy.  From Alexander Radishchev’s courageous depiction of autocratic serfdom to Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s radical blueprints for revolutionary transformation, we trace the explosive collision between Western philosophy and imperial reality that set erected much of the intellectual framing for subsequent Russian culture and historical consciousness. We will dive into the fiercest intellectual battles of the era—the cultural trauma of the Napoleonic Wars, the philosophical debates between Westernizers and Slavophiles, the political impact of 1848’s “Springtime of the Peoples,” and the generational clash between 1840s idealists and 1860s nihilists, and the birth of revolutionary Populism. We will try to understand how literature, aesthetics, and political philosophy converge to undermine an empire's ideological foundations and set the stage for the defining revolution of our time.

All readings and discussions in English.

It is widely known that in the Soviet Union, from the first years after the Revolution of 1917, the image of a "New Person," with not only a new morality but also a new physical body, was enthusiastically constructed on both verbal and visual levels and then thoroughly developed and widely propagandized. Literature and visual arts played a significant role in creating and disseminating these images. The same media were also often used to transmit normative ideas about health, illness, hygiene, sexuality, etc. Lived reality, however, frequently contradicted the propaganda and the iconic images it produced, and some works of art registered that tension, sometimes deliberately, sometimes without meaning to. This course will discuss Soviet attitudes and practices towards the body, disciplining the body, and the role of sport and exercise in human life. We will also focus on the work of healthcare institutions, discuss issues of medical ethics, and address models of relationships between patients and doctors that significantly differ from those we know from 20th-century Western Europe and the USA. Throughout, we will look at the normative images, at the practices, and at the ways in which their divergence was reflected upon.

This course is addressed to students interested in Soviet culture and history. It may be of particular interest to those who have not learned a lot about Soviet culture, but who plan to specialize in medicine and healthcare. The literary and visual works suggested for discussion will help us understand the specific traits in Soviet perceptions of health, illness, and death that have carried over into the post-Soviet period.

 

We will explore Anton Chekhov’s work on its own terms, in its cultural context, and in relation to the work of others, especially Anglophone writers who responded, directly or indirectly, to Chekhov and his work. Readings by Chekhov include selected stories (short and long), his four major plays, and Sakhalin Island, his study of the Russian penal colony.

There are no prerequisites.  Knowledge of Russian is not required; all readings in English.

Students who know Russian are encouraged to read Chekhov’s work in Russian.

The course will be comparative as it addresses Chekhov on his own and in relation to anglophone writers.

The course is open to undergraduates (CC, GS, BC) and graduates in GSAS and other schools. The attention to how Chekhov writes may interest students in the School of the Arts.

Dismissed, mocked, feared or loved for decades, video games have become a staple of contemporary media, art, and popular culture, studied alongside literature and film. They eclipse the global yearly revenue of both film and music industries combined, leaving their financial significance undeniable. What remains understudied, however, is the political and cultural significance of the medium as they relate to literature and other forms of cultural production. War Games is a course dedicated to the intersection of literature and video games with political violence (both real and imaginary) in a global and particularly post-Cold War context. 

 

Students will learn the fundamentals of narratology as they explore the formal mechanisms of literature and its relation to digital games. Through this, they will learn to recognize patterns of ideological communication in both literary texts and video games while developing close reading skills of traditional and digital media. We combine the study of literature and video games with broader inquiries into the media that circulate through the game mediaverse. Reading books and playing games, we pose the following questions: How do writers and readers imagine war through literary texts, how do players “perform” war in games, and how might they resist or subvert expected performances? What themes and ideas are revealed effectively through one medium versus another? What are the political implications for the ideologies present in a video game given the globalized position of the medium? Assigned readings will include novels, short stories, news media, and internet forums alongside a range of scholarly secondary materials. Students will have the opportunity to play each game on the syllabus in a group environment. All readings, materials, and discussions will be in English.

 

This seminar examines the grotesque as one of Eastern European literature’s most productive formal resources: a way of revealing what happens when incompatibilities are forced into uneasy coexistence in various representational sites – whether that be the same body, image, voice, institution, or world. We will read works from a wide range of Eastern European traditions – Russian, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Czech, Polish, Romanian, Albanian, South Slavic/post-Yugoslav, and Hungarian. The course is comparative and does not treat Eastern Europe as a monoculture. Instead, it asks why writers whose lives and works have been informed by a great diversity of forces – empires, border changes, modernization, war, revolution, state socialism, post-socialist transition, folklore, and ecological crisis – converge on the grotesque as a representational strategy.  We will also learn how to read the meanings of various grotesque representational staples – distorted bodies, animate objects, proliferating doubles, impossible bureaucracies, unstable genres, and comic catastrophe.

Across the semester, we will develop a sophisticated working definition of the grotesque by examining its greatest theorists – from Bakhtin and Kayser to Eikhenbaum, Ruskin, Thomson, Harpham, Russo, and Connelly.

The literary readings are assigned as whole works: unexcerpted novels and novellas, plays, and stories or story cycles. Only scholarship and theoretical books will be assigned in excerpts. All readings are available in English

 

Literature and film provide critical reflections on how nuclear technology and its dangers have shaped Soviet and post-Soviet imaginations and worldviews. This course draws from multiple literary and creative narratives that respond to the region’s nuclear history, tracing how official discourse was first subverted by dissident narratives, and then, over the course of the Perestroika period (1985–1991), subsumed within them. Alongside disasters like Chernobyl, we will investigate nuclear legacies across the former Soviet sphere, including in Kazakhstan, where the Soviet government detonated more than 450 nuclear tests over a forty-year period, and in Lithuania, where inhabitants of a former “nuclear city” still live as if beyond history’s reach. How did artistic narratives shape Soviet nuclear realities, and vice versa? How have nuclear concerns fostered cultural exchange and solidarity in unexpected ways? These questions will guide our inquiry.

While works of literature, film, and art from the (post-)Soviet world take precedence, the course seeks to situate them within their international geopolitical and cultural contexts; as such, some key works from other cultural spaces will be considered as points of comparison or as relevant primary texts. Classes will include both lecture and discussion elements; each class period will be devoted to a broad aspect shared among the assigned readings and will focus on determining what each work sought to achieve within its own cultural-historical context. Assignments will be approximately 100–150 pages or two to three viewing hours per class period. In addition, there will be a weekly film screening, with approximately two (and sometimes more) screen hours of film.

Weekly written responses will be supplemented on occasion with short interactive assignments. Each student is expected to give one 10-to-12-minute presentation during the semester on a major theme from a given week’s assigned materials; the presentation will serve as a genesis for wider discussion. There will be one midterm essay (responses to be four to six pages in length) due at the end of Week 6. One final essay (responses to be eight to ten pages in length) will be due during the exam period at the end of the semester.

Introduction to the avant-garde movements in East and Central Europe between the 1910s and 1930s (e.g., futurism, dadaism, constructivism, surrealism), studied through collaborations and debates among artists who met in the metropolitan centers of Paris, Berlin, Zurich, Kyiv, Moscow and St. Petersburg, Prague, Warsaw, Zagreb and Belgrade. Methodologically, the course is designed to instruct students in cross-disciplinary analysis, moving between the frameworks of literary, visual, and cultural studies. Our objects of study include manifestos and poetry, the avant-garde book, cinepoetry and photomontage, film, theater, street performances, and architecture. These objects guide us in creating interdisciplinary dialogue (as understood by comparative media studies); examining exchange, hybridization, and tension between word, image, genre, and multiple authorial voices.  
 

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepare students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Prerequisites: CZCH UN1102 or the equivalent Rapid review of grammar. Readings in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, depending upon the interests of individual students.

Essentials of the spoken and written language. Prepares students to read texts of moderate difficulty by the end of the first year.

Prerequisites: POLI UN1102 or the equivalent. Rapid review of grammar; readings in contemporary nonfiction or fiction, depending on the interests of individual students.

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.

Designed for students with little or no knowledge of Ukrainian. Basic grammar structures are introduced and reinforced, with equal emphasis on developing oral and written communication skills. Specific attention to acquisition of high-frequency vocabulary and its optimal use in real-life settings.

Prerequisites: UKRN UN1102 or the equivalent. Reviews and reinforces the fundamentals of grammar and a core vocabulary from daily life. Principal emphasis is placed on further development of communicative skills (oral and written). Verbal aspect and verbs of motion receive special attention.

This course is organized around a number of thematic centers or modules. Each is focused on stylistic peculiarities typical of a given functional style of the Ukrainian language. Each is designed to assist the student in acquiring an active command of lexical, grammatical, discourse, and stylistic traits that distinguish one style from the others and actively using them in real-life communicative settings in contemporary Ukraine. The styles include literary fiction, scholarly prose, and journalism, both printed and broadcast