Slavic Languages & Literatures

Courses

RUSS 603a, Russian Realist Literature and Painting  Molly Brunson

An interdisciplinary examination of the development of nineteenth-century Russian realism in literature and the visual arts. Topics include the Natural School and the formulation of a realist aesthetic; the artistic strategies and polemics of critical realism; narrative, genre, and the rise of the novel; the Wanderers and the articulation of a Russian school of painting; realism, modernism, and the challenges of periodization. Readings include novels, short stories, and critical works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Goncharov, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and others. Painters of focus include Fedotov, Perov, Shishkin, Repin, and Kramskoy. Special attention is given to the particular methodological demands of inter-art analysis.
T 3:30pm-5:20pm

RUSS 630a / ANTH 430a / ANTH 630a / E&RS 531a / RUSS 430a, Post-Pravda: Truth, Falsehood, and Media in (post-)Socialism and Beyond  Dominic Martin

Following the election of Donald Trump, Brexit, and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal, it has been declared that Euro-America has entered a 'post-truth' era. Academics, politicians and the media use this term, often connecting it to Russia, without explicit formulation of what it is or might be. This upper-level seminar discusses recent social scientific work in socialist and postsocialist countries to outline a coherent conceptual and empirical picture of a 'post-truth' situation. The works under discussion theorize the relationship between power and knowledge in socialism and postsocialism through the discursive productions of journalists, bloggers, actors, secret policemen, musicians, politicians, and others. Mapping the intricacies of knowledge, personhood, and expression within socialism and postsocialism, these authors present broader arguments about the epistemic roots of the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe and Russia and the rise of authoritarian populism. The seminar considers how socialist and postsocialist uses of media and linguistic productions foreshadowed, and latterly have come to intersect with, the production and consumption of media and information in Europe and the United States.
T 9:25am-11:15am

RUSS 651b, Chekhov  Edyta Bojanowska

Detailed study of Anton Chekhov’s writing in all genres: fiction, nonfiction, and drama. Focus on Chekhov’s formal innovations, literary polemics with contemporaries and predecessors, and his works’ embeddedness within the social contexts of late imperial Russia and late Victorian Europe. Attentive close reading of texts is combined with interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Chekhov, such as ecocriticism, performance studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, theories of the spatial turn, and medical humanities. Prerequisite: students without reading knowledge of Russian need permission of the instructor.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

RUSS 689b, Russian Symbolist Poetry  Marijeta Bozovic

This graduate seminar explores Russian Symbolist poetry in cultural and international contexts. We study the philosophical foundations (Nietzsche, Solovyov); the preoccupation with various temporalities (modernity); the longing for total art (Wagner) bounded by lyric form; aestheticism; utopianism; decadence; and other topics. Our readings include the works of Vladimir Solovyov, Valery Bryusov, Konstantin Balmont, Fedor Sologub, Zinaida Gippius, Mikhail Kuzmin, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Andrei Bely, and Aleksandr Blok—as well as of "post-Symbolists" Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Our approach emphasizes prosody, genre, and medium as well as the dissemination of ideas across media and cultures. Weekly practices involve close reading, research, theoretical reframing, and ongoing collaborative participation and presentations.
T 9:25am-11:15am

RUSS 696a / FILM 775a, Post-Stalin Literature and Film  Katerina Clark

The main developments in Russian and Soviet literature and film from Stalin’s death in 1953 to the present.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm, T 7pm-9pm

RUSS 699b / CPLT 677b, The Performing Arts in Twentieth-Century Russia  Katerina Clark

Covers ballet, opera, theater, mass spectacle, and film. Theory of the performing arts, including selections from the writings of some of the most famous Russian directors, such as Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein, and Balanchine. Their major productions and some of the major Russian plays of the twentieth century (e.g., by Chekhov, Mayakovsky, Bulgakov, and contemporary dramatists). No knowledge of Russian required. Students taking the course for credit in Comparative Literature can write their papers on texts in other languages.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

RUSS 714b / FILM 630b, Soviet Cinema and the Distribution of Perception  John MacKay

Soviet filmmakers and theorists in the 1920s were preoccupied with the way that the established cinema harnessed perception in socially determined, class-specific ways, and sought a variety of alternatives. This course examines those alternatives and their limitations, as postulated in theory and realized on film, as well as their long-term, global influence on theoretical and moving image practice. We examine films and writings by such figures as Vertov, Eisenstein, Shub, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Room, Ruttmann, Liu Na’ou, Grierson, Buñuel, Cavalcanti, Peixoto, Deren, Jacobs, Dorsky, Godard, Farocki, Burnett, Akerman, and Wang Bing.
M 7pm-8:50pm

SLAV 752a, The Slavic Peoples and Their Languages: From Unity to Diversity  Harvey Goldblatt

Examination of the linguistic and cultural history of the Slavs from their prehistoric period up to the formation of the diverse Slavic languages, the individual Slavic states, and their national literatures.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

SLAV 754a, Church Slavonic  Harvey Goldblatt

A study of the long history of Church Slavonic, with special attention given to “New” or “Synodal” Church Slavonic, the language used in the “Elizabeth” or “Synodal” Bible (first published in 1751), which remains even today the authorized version of the Russian Orthodox Church. Special emphasis is placed on the reading of representative New Testament excerpts from this Synodal Bible, comparing them to equivalent textual portions written in both earlier forms of Russian Church Slavonic and Modern Russian. Prerequisite: knowledge of Modern Russian. Conducted in English.
T 9:25am-11:15am

SLAV 900a or b, Directed Reading  Staff

By arrangement with faculty.
HTBA