Undergraduate CORE Courses
in Russian Language, Literature, and Culture
All courses award 3 semester credit hours unless otherwise indicated
RUSS 201 Intermediate Russian I (5 credits)
Prerequisites: RUSS 102, RUSS 114, or equivalent
CORE course: Humanities (HO)
Continued activation and expansion of skills and knowledge acquired in an elementary Russian course with the goal of communicative competence.
Two hours of lecture and four hours of laboratory per week. Not open to native speakers of Russian.
RUSS 202 Intermediate Russian II (5 credits)
Prerequisites: RUSS 201
CORE course: Humanities (HO)
Continued activation and expansion of skills and knowledge acquired in RUSS 201 with the goal of communicative competence.
Two hours of lecture and four hours of laboratory per week. Not open to native speakers of Russian.
RUSS 221 Masterworks of Russian Literature I
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: Literature (HL)
Introduction to the classics of Russian literature in translation, beginning with Pushkin in the early nineteenth century and concluding with the works of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in the later part of that century.
RUSS 222 Masterworks of Russian Literature II
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: Literature (HL)
This course provides an incomplete survey of Russian literature of the newly-concluded and wildly eventful 20th-century. We will begin with Chekhov, a writer who can be seen as both the last great writer of the 19th century and the first of the 20th century; we will go on to read works by Zamiatin, Bulgakov, Kharms, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Erofeev, and a memoir by Eugenia Ginzburg.
Almost all of the works we will be reading (with the exception of the Chekhov) were banned at one time or another under the Soviet regime, or were never published at all; in this sense, the course conveys something of the excitement of the late 20th century, when earlier, forbidden works began to surface one by one, slowly revealing the past. The focus of this course will be on the careful reading and interpretation of literature, and on expressing ideas about literature in writing.
RUSS 281 Russian Language and Pre-Revolutionary Culture
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: Humanities (HO)
Introduction to the Russian language and study of Russian nationalism; artistic and social concepts in the development of Russian art, dance, geography, history, and literature from the 18th to the 20th centuries.
Lectures in English, with third hour devoted to basic language instruction (alphabet, vocabulary, pronunciation, and minimal conversational skills). Not open to native speakers of Russian.
RUSS 282 Contemporary Russian Culture
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: Humanities (HO) / Diversity (D)
Russia of the post-Communist era. An exploration of the cultural implications of the disintegration of the former Soviet Union. Also included is a brief introduction to the Russian language: alphabet, elementary reading and survival skills for the first time traveler.
Course format includes a combination of lectures, group discussions, videos, and optional field trips.
RUSS298K Soviet Film: Propaganda, Myth, Modernism
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: History/Theory of the Arts (HA)
A survey of Soviet film from the 1920s to 1991, with the main emphases on the 1920s and 1960s. The course focuses on important directors, genres, themes, and styles, beginning with the most internationally famous period of Soviet silent cinema (1925-1930), and continuing through the Stalin period (1929-1953), into the "Thaw" (mid '50s to '60s), the period of "stagnation" under Brezhnev, and finally, "glasnost."
Theoretical issues to be considered include: "propaganda"-- ideology and its integral role in Soviet art, in particular in the overarching rubric of "Socialist Realism," declared as doctrine in 1934; "myth"-- the various myths of the individual, the Russian/Soviet "nation," and history as embodied in Soviet film; and "modernism"-- the structural and technical characteristics of Soviet film art, especially as described by Soviet film theorists.
RUSS298M Russian Cinema at the end of the Millennium
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: Humanities (HO) / Diversity (D)
The course traces the evolution of Russian cinema in the context of the changing Russian reality. The eighties and the nineties witnessed dramatic changes in the social, political, and cultural life in Russia. The burst of economic, social, and cultural activity, deep changes in the way of life and in the lifestyle, and new values brought about by perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness), the collapse of the Soviet Empire and of Communism as the only official ideology had a strong impact on the arts, and especially on filmmaking.
The newly acquired freedom of expression allowed filmmakers to deal
openly with topics, which had been banned from the screen by official
censorship: the Communist past, the cult of Stalin, anti-Semitism, sex,
violence, crime, drugs. The films from the late nineties reflect the
post-Communist Russia’s renewed quest for national identity, the rise of
nationalism, and its search for a national hero.
RUSS298P Dostoevsky and the Russian Soul
Prerequisites: None
CORE course: Literature (HL)
It is well known that the tremendous success of Dostoevsky’s novels in the West coincided with the development of psychoanalysis. Dostoevsky’s exploration of the dark side of the psyche shaped a mythological image of the Russian soul and fascinated Freud who wrote that Dostoevsky “himself illustrates psychoanalysis in every character, in every sentence”. However, Freud’s own analysis of Dostoevsky created much controversy. In this class we study two major works of Dostoevsky with reference to related developments in Russian and European culture, literary criticism, and intellectual history to investigate why his work has fascinated readers and psychologists for two centuries.