Global Arc

This Junior Seminar is designed to prepare students to undertake independent research in the Slavic field. We will workshop both methodological approaches and develop the core research skills necessary to complete the English-language research paper. We will identify successful research questions and workshop works-in-progress. Additionally, this seminar will introduce students to the expectations for citations in English for Russian-language sources.

The course will examine the emergence of rock music in the period leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and its enduring cultural and political significance in post-Soviet Russia (including recent protest movements) while developing students' appreciation of colloquial Russian. We will encounter a number of fascinating people and artists, charting their musical development, their forays into other genres (particularly film), and their political impact. Assignments will be listening to the music while studying the original Russian lyrics (with glosses and translations).

Topics include: Russian literature and the city; Russian literature and the intellectual; the search for moral value in post-Communist literature; satire; Russian literature and music; 20th-century Russian poetry, Russian émigré literature.

Topics include: Russian literature and the city; Russian literature and the intellectual; the search for moral value in post-Communist literature; satire; Russian literature and music; 20th-century Russian poetry, Russian émigré literature.

An introduction to Pushkin's works with attention to a number of genres (lyric, long poem, drama, short story). Readings in Russian with discussions in Russian or English, depending on students' preference. Two 90-minute classes. Prerequisite: RUS 207 or instructor's permission.

The course is primarily about War and Peace, framed by some earlier and later fiction and by Tolstoy's essays on art and religion. Tolstoy's radical ideas on narrative have a counterpart in his radical ideas on history, causation, and the formation of a moral self. Together, these concepts offer an alternative to "The Russian Idea," associated with Dostoevsky and marked by mysticism, apocalypse, and the crisis moment. To refute this idea, Tolstoy redefined the tasks of novelistic prose. Seminar.

A consideration of Dostoevsky's major works with particular emphasis upon their relation to the political, social, religious, and literary currents of his time. Knowledge of Russian not required. One three-hour seminar.

An examination of Nabokov's major accomplishments as a Russian/American novelist in the context of the Russian literary tradition and the cultural climate of emigration. Two lectures, one preceptorial.

An introduction to major Russian poets from Pushkin to the present. No prior knowledge of Russian literature is assumed. The focus of the course will be on close readings of individual poems, but the intention is, by generalization, to reach an understanding of the development of Russian literature as a whole. Readings in Russian, with discussion in English, and an optional hour for discussion in Russian. Prerequisites: RUS 207 (may be taken concurrently) or permission of instructor. Two 90-minute seminars.

Inspired by utopian ideas of equality and universal brotherhood, communism was conceived as an alternative to capitalism's crises. This attempt to build a new world was costly and brutal: equality was quickly transformed into uniformity; brotherhood morphed into the Big Brother. The course provides an in-depth review of these oscillations between utopian motivations and oppressive practices. It will present central players of Soviet Utopia: from Lenin to Malevich; from Stalin to Eisenstein. Major political texts, key cultural documents and films of the period help us trace the emergence and disappearance of commumist modernity.