Previous Semesters

Russian Courses

Polish Courses

SAS Core Courses

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Considering a major or minor in Russian?

Russian Language Courses

Elementary Russian I
01:860:101:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
MTTh3 11:30am-12:50pm, MTh FH A4, T FH B3

Open only to students with NO prior knowledge of Russian. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.

Elementary Russian is an intensive introductory course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students with no prior experience in the language. It develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing, as well as the basics of Russian grammar. It also introduces students to Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, various media, and other supplementary materials. It is highly recommended that all 860:101 also take First Year Russian Language Lab.

Elementary Russian I - Hybrid section
01:860:101:02
Mi E Li
MTh2 9:50am-11:10am, M SC 203, Th SC 220

Elementary Russian I - Hybrid section
01:860:101:03
Dr. Thomas Dyne
TTh7 6:10pm-7:30pm, SC 114

Open only to students with NO prior knowledge of Russian. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.

This course/section of Elementary Russian (see full description below) is a “hybrid” of traditional and online learning. Students will meet face-to-face for two 80-minute classes per week, and will complete online assignments twice per week. This is a four-credit course, meaning that you are expected to engage with the materials for 6-8 hours outside of class (roughly one hour every day), including your online assignments, written homework, and other study. By working outside of class on aspects of how Russian works, we will have more time in class to focus on using Russian to communicate, implementing what is practiced online. Online assignments will include reading dialogues and grammar explanations, and completing exercises to test reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary and grammar, and speaking. Some material will be presented for the first time online, but there will always be time for review and questions in the face-to-face sessions. There will also be written homework, typically due at each face-to-face class session. 

Elementary Russian is an intensive introductory course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students with no prior experience in the language. It develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing, as well as the basics of Russian grammar. It also introduces students to Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, various media, and other supplementary materials. It is highly recommended that all 860:101 also take First Year Russian Language Lab.

 

First Year Russian Language Lab
01:860:103:01
Dr. Thomas Dyne
W3 11:30am-12:50pm, MU 113

This course helps students improve their pronunciation, intonation, listening, and conversation skills in standard Russian. Students will learn to use a Russian keyboard and to navigate Russian language websites. Other materials include authentic Russian print media and audio-visual materials, such as film clips and cartoons. Only open to students who are currently enrolled in Russian 101.

Intermediate Russian I
01:860:201:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
MTTh5 2:50pm-4:10pm, SC 207

Prerequisite: 01:860:102 or placement. Not for students who have taken 01:860:107.

Intermediate Russian is an intensive intermediate course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students who have completed Russian 102 or placed into the course by exam. This course is not for students who have completed Russian 107 or those who speak Russian at home with their family. The course develops proficiency in all four skills: speaking, reading, listening, and writing. It includes a review and expansion of Russian grammar and vocabulary. It deepens students’ understanding of Russian life, culture, history, geography, and traditions through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other supplementary materials. It is highly recommended that all 860:201 students also take Second Year Russian Language Lab.

Second Year Russian Language Lab
01:860:203:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
M6 4:30-5:50pm, AB 3200

This course continues helping students improve pronunciation, intonation, listening, and conversation skills in standard Russian. Students will master use of a Russian keyboard and to navigate Russian language websites. Other materials include authentic Russian print media and audio-visual materials, such as television clips and cartoons. Only open to students who are currently enrolled in Russian 201 or 207.

Elementary Russian for Russian Speakers
01:860:207:01
Svetlana Bogomolny
MTTh3 11:30am-12:50pm, AB West Wing Room 4050

Prerequisite: Placement. Credit not given for both this course and 860:201.

Second Year Russian for Russian Speakers is intended for students who learned to speak Russian in the home or from family members, with little or no formal study or experience with reading or writing Russian. Students will master reading and writing in the Russian alphabet, solidify their knowledge of Russian grammar, including case endings and verbal forms, and increase their vocabulary. This course also introduces students to Russian culture, literature and history through authentic target-language texts, websites and media (including films and music) and other supplementary materials.

Advanced Russian I
01:860:301:01
Svetlana Bogomolny
TTh5 2:50pm-4:10pm, SC 220

Prerequisite: 860:202, 860:208, or placement.

This is an advanced course in spoken and written contemporary standard Russian, intended for students who have completed the equivalent of four semesters of college-level Russian, or have placed into the course by exam. The course strengthens grammatical control and develops proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, and writing. Students will learn to summarize, develop narration, and create connected paragraphs in speech and writing. The will also study complex grammatical structures, such as participles and gerunds, and syntactic constructions, such as subordination. They will broaden their vocabulary through the study of word-formation. This course covers many elements of modern Russian life, such as education, employment, leisure and youth culture, through authentic target-language texts, websites, media (including films and music) and other materials.

Contemporary Russian Culture: From Perestroika to the Present
01:860:403:01
Dr. Cori Anderson
TTh6 4:30pm-5:50pm, AB 2250

Prerequisite: 01:860:302, or 01:860:306, or placement. May be taken out of sequence with 860: 401, 860:402, or 860:404.

This course fulfills a literature course requirement for the Russian Language minor.

Taught primarily in Russian, the course fosters advanced language skills of conversational fluency, listening comprehension, writing and composition, expanded vocabulary, recognition of stylistic registers, and advanced syntax. These skills are practiced while exploring the changing contemporary culture of Russia through the economic structure, the family structure, domestic politics, foreign policy, and recollections of Perestroika (political reforms of the 1980s). Students will read literary and non-literary texts on these topics, alongside contemporary films and television programs.

Russian Literature Courses

Introduction to 20th Century Russian Literature
01:860:260:01
Professor Pavel Khazanov

TTh4, 1:10pm-2:30pm, SC 202

In English. No prerequisites. 

What is the meaning of the Russian Revolution? What is freedom and what is it for? How do we reckon with our bloody legacy? Who is a socialist? Who has the right to speak, and to what end? These overarching questions dominated Russian culture throughout its ‘Soviet century,’ imprinting themselves on some of the greatest works of Russian literature and film. Our course will use a modular approach to shine the light of fiction onto the many facets of real life in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1991. We will carefully consider the continuities and breaks of Soviet Russian culture, sometimes going against the grain of commonplace assumptions about this era. We will engage with the texts of world famous Soviet-era writers, such as Babel, Platonov, Mikhail Bulgakov, Shalamov, and Dovlatov as well as authors less well-known outside of Russia, such as Lydia Ginzburg, Terz, Trifonov, Chukovskaya, Iskander, Olesha, Baranskaya and Pelevin. We will also watch six films by Andrei Tarkovsky, Khutsiev, Nikita Mikhalkov, Daneliya, Abuladze and Muratova. All readings and class discussions in English. This course fulfills the SAS core goal AHp.

Tolstoy's War and Peace
01:860:289:01
Dr. Thomas Dyne

MW6, 4:30pm-5:50pm, MU 212

In English. No prerequisites.

In this course, we have the rare chance to spend a semester reading one great book: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1865–69). War and Peace tells the story of Russia’s military struggles with Napoleon between 1805 and 1812, but it is also a story about friendship, seduction, love, marriage, and death; parents and children, politics and strategy, the search for one’s place in the world, and ultimately, the structure of history and time itself. As we read the novel, we will pause to explore in depth some of the big questions it raises: how history gets written; the uses of art and literature; and the problems of causality, moral responsibility, and free will. We will discuss the place of War and Peace in Tolstoy’s life and career, and also the book’s own afterlife in film and stage adaptations, from Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1960s film epic to the hit Broadway musical “Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.” Through all these topics, the course combines immersion in the world of War and Peace with an investigation of how and where the novel leads us beyond its covers. No prerequisites; all readings and discussions in English. Fulfills SAS Core goal WCd.

 

Special Topics: Russians Abroad
01:860:320:01
Professor Pavel Khazanov

TTh5, 2:50pm-4:10pm, SC 102

Is Russia different from “the West”? What happens to Russian culture when it is contemplated from afar? Is life outside of Russia exile or liberation? Does a Russian abroad become a stranger to Russian culture, and to what degree is that feeling productive or painful? These kinds of questions have occurred to quite a number of key Russian and Russophone cultural figures over the last two centuries. Moreover, Russia’s political cataclysms have also produced several waves of emigré communities, sometimes measuring in the millions, with many exiled writers living, thinking and writing about Russia, as well as its Imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet peripheries. Our class will examine impactful voices of “Russians abroad” in the widest sense of the term. We will look at celebrated Russian-language writers, from Dostoevsky, Bunin and Nabokov, to Dovlatov and Dina Rubina. We will read non-Russian literature by Russophone-origin writers, from Ayn Rand to David Bezmozgis and Andrei Makine. We will also read texts by emigré writers returning to Russia, like Michael Idov, and watch films by emigré filmmakers, such as Tarkovsky. This course fulfills the WCr requirement. All readings and class discussions in English.

Dostoevsky
01:860:330:01
Dr. Thomas Dyne
Cross-listed with Comparative Literature (195:311:01)

MW4, 1:10pm-2:30pm, CA A3

In English. No prerequisites.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881) explored the human mind and soul through some of the most vivid and tenacious characters in world literature: murderers, madmen, children, terrorists, atheists, and prostitutes; brothers and sisters; gamblers and saints. Many of his eerily modern ethical, psychological, and political insights stemmed from his fear of a world without God: a condition that he rejected on moral grounds, but which he compellingly represented in his fiction. This course traces Dostoevsky’s career as a literary celebrity, political prisoner, traveler, journalist, religious and nationalist thinker, and especially, as a novelist who pushed the genre to its outermost formal and philosophical bounds. We’ll focus most closely on three 1860s masterpieces: Notes from the Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), and The Idiot (1868). No prerequisites; all readings and discussions in English. Fulfills SAS Core goals AHo, AHp.

 

787 - Polish Courses

Elementary Polish I
01:787:101:01
Wanda Mandecki
MTTh4 1:10-2:30pm, MTh AB 2150, T4, AB 2200

Open to students with NO prior knowledge of Polish. Students with prior knowledge must take a placement test.

Elementary Polish is an introductory course intended for students with no or minimal prior experience in the language. Students will learn the Polish sound and spelling system. They will develop proficiency in listening, reading, speaking, and writing. The basic of grammar and core vocabulary are introduced.  In addition, the course provides an introduction to Polish culture, including geography, history, literature and practices through authentic texts, maps, websites and other supplementary materials. 

Intermediate Polish I
01:787:201:01
Wanda Mandecki
MTTh5 2:50-4:10pm, AB 2250

Prerequisite: 787:102 or placement.

Intermediate Polish I is intended for students who have completed Elementary Polish or have placed into the course. Students will continue to develop proficiency in four skills: listening, reading, speaking, and writing. Orthography drills reinforce the sound and spelling system. This course will broaden students’ grammatical understanding and vocabulary. Students will read an authentic literary text, view a Polish film, and discuss current events in Poland, which will deepen students' knowledge of Polish history and culture.