Russian (RUSS) 1 RUSS206 A Matter of Life and Death: Fiction in the Soviet Era The great Russian writers of the 20th century risked their lives insisting on RUSSIAN (RUSS) moral absolutes to counter Soviet doctrine. Zamyatin's WE inspired BRAVE NEW RUSS101 Elementary Russian I WORLD and 1984; Bulgakov's MASTER AND MARGARITA remained hidden for This beginning course in Russian teaches basic grammar while providing 27 years; Solzhenitsyn dared to submit IVAN DENISOVICH during Khrushchev's extensive practice in speaking and listening to contemporary Russian. Because of Thaw--each decade has its characteristic masterpiece. (Students who wish to the intensive workload, the student earns 1.5 credits for this course. read excerpts from the course readings in the original Russian should see the Offering: Host instructor to enroll in a 0.5 credit tutorial.) Grading: OPT Offering: Host Credits: 1.50 Grading: OPT Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Credits: 1.00 Prereq: None Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Identical With: REES206, RULE206 RUSS102 Elementary Russian II Prereq: None The course continues to develop basic skills in speaking, writing, and listening to contemporary Russian, as well as the knowledge of basic grammar. Because of RUSS208F Otherness & Belonging (FYS) the intensive workload, the student earns 1.5 credits for this course. One of the many haunting utterances of Fyodor Dostoevsky's most famous Offering: Host antihero, the Underground Man, is "I am alone, I thought, and they are Grading: OPT everyone." Like him, the other protagonists of this course are outcasts, Credits: 1.50 dissidents, and strangers - jaded office clerks and repressed misanthropes, queer Gen Ed Area: HA-REES activists and "enemies of the state" - who refuse to conform to societal norms, Prereq: RUSS101 disrupt conventions by saying the unsayable, and write and make art from the margins, the realm of undesirables. Focusing mainly on Russia and Eastern RUSS201 Intermediate Russian I Europe, we will analyze representations of otherness and belonging in fiction, This course presents a continued study of Russian grammar with an emphasis non-fiction, and film. We will explore narratives of undesirability through the on a complete analysis of the verb system. Exercises in class develop fluency in thematic prisms of exile and immigration; gender and sexuality; mental illness; speaking and understanding spoken Russian while teaching the rules of Russian prison writing; ethnic difference; religion; and unrequited love. The concept of grammar. undesirability will also be our point of entry for constructing arguments about Offering: Host community, privilege, and a society without outsiders. Grading: OPT Offering: Crosslisting Credits: 1.00 Grading: OPT Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Credits: 1.00 Prereq: (RUSS101 AND RUSS102) Gen Ed Area: HA-REES RUSS202 Intermediate Russian II Identical With: REES208F, RULE208F, WLIT245F This course presents a continued study of Russian grammar with an emphasis Prereq: None on a complete analysis of the verb system. Exercises in class develop fluency in RUSS212 The Short Course: Readings in 20th-Century Fiction speaking and understanding spoken Russian while teaching the rules of Russian Supplementary to RUSS206, this course should ideally be taken concomitantly grammar. with it, since the readings will be excerpts from RUSS206 to be done in Russian. Offering: Host Designed for Russian majors to do advanced work with the texts they read in Grading: OPT RUSS206, the discussion will focus on close stylistic analysis. Credits: 1.00 Offering: Host Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Grading: OPT Prereq: RUSS101 AND RUSS102 AND RUSS201 Credits: 0.50 RUSS205 Murder and Adultery: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the 19th-Century Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Russian Novel Identical With: REES212 The 19th-century novel is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Prereq: (RUSS202 AND [RUSS206 or REES206 or RULE206]) Russian literature. This course will trace its development from Pushkin's elegant, RUSS220 Speak, Memory: The Russian Memoir witty novel in verse, EUGENE ONEGIN, through the grotesque comedy of Gogol, Memoirs offer a chance for individuals to make sense of their relationship to the realist masterpieces of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with their complex to larger historical forces and allow writers of fiction and poetry to reflect depiction of human psychology and the philosophical struggles of late 19th- on the tensions between biography and the creative process. We will read century society. We will consider the historical background in which the novels memoirs of prison and of Stalinist terror by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nadezhda were produced and the tools developed by Russian critical theory, especially the Mandelstam; visions of childhood by Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and poets Russian formalists and Mikhail Bakhtin, for understanding 19th-century Russian Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva; and works of autobiography by Viktor prose. Shklovsky and Sergey Gandlevsky that create their own worlds of literary Offering: Host experimentation. The course will also consider the theoretical problems of Grading: OPT autobiographical writing. Students will write a memoir of childhood (3-5 pages) Credits: 1.00 to better understand the technical problems faced by Tolstoy in writing about his Gen Ed Area: HA-REES childhood. Students will also write a piece of memoiristic prose, or a parody or Identical With: REES205, RULE205, WLIT241 imitation of one of the writers in the course (minimum 10 pages), as one of their Prereq: None three papers. We will devote one class session to a writing workshop session on the creative project. Offering: Host 2 Russian (RUSS) Grading: OPT Prereq: None Credits: 1.00 RUSS235 Queer Russia Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Russia is accustomed to playing the role of the "evil empire." The current Identical With: REES220, RULE220, WLIT243 ongoing war in Ukraine has resurrected the Cold War-era narratives about Russia Prereq: None as a dark, aggressive, and ruthless military power. The notorious legislation of RUSS223 After Communism: Animals, Avatars, Hybrids recent years--whose functions range from barring Americans from adopting During the last two decades of the 20th century, a wide array of Soviet and post- Russian orphans to criminalizing the so-called "gay propaganda"--have further Soviet writers either replaced or merged the traditional human protagonist with solidified Russia's reputation as a country with little regard for human rights. another: the animal. Whether featuring a penguin avatar or disillusioned insects; Yet generations of Russian poets, artists, and writers have transformed the a human centipede or a pack of werewolves, these literary works directly and country's systematic oppression and violence into spectacular forms of protest indirectly shed light on the historical context in which they were written: the and self-expression. This course focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring last decade before and the one immediately following the dissolution of the an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from Soviet Union. Keeping in mind this historical and social context, we will analyze the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine poetry, fiction, art, representations of hybridity, violence, sexuality, and (imagined) communities-- memoirs, plays, films, performances, and discursive texts that showcase uniquely all through texts that challenge us to consider what the animal represents and Russian conceptions of marriage, gender relations, gender expression, and how it affects our expectations of narrative. The secondary readings will situate sexual identity. Attention will be paid to the ways in which Russian and Western the animal in a broader philosophical and theoretical framework, and special narratives of queerness align and diverge. In English. No knowledge of Russian is attention will be paid to postmodernism as a movement in literature and art. required or expected. Conducted in English. Offering: Crosslisting Offering: Host Grading: OPT Grading: OPT Credits: 1.00 Credits: 1.00 Gen Ed Area: HA-REES Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES Identical With: REES235, RULE235, FGSS234 Identical With: REES223, RULE223, WLIT256 Prereq: None Prereq: None RUSS240F Reading Stories: Great Short Works from Gogol to Petrushevskaya RUSS224 Performing Russian Culture: From Peter the Great to the Russian (FYS) Revolution This course is designed to help students improve their writing through the This course offers a survey of Russian culture from 1700-1917 through the close reading and analysis of short stories and novellas by Russian masters of perspective of performance studies. Starting with the reign of Peter the Great the form. Students will be asked to bring to each class their ideas on how to and ending on the eve of the revolution, we read some of the seminal works of construct an argument that could be developed into a written interpretation the Russian literary canon, including plays, poems, short stories, and novels. We of the work being discussed. These discussions, along with work on building also consider examples from visual and material culture: paintings, sculptures, logical arguments, recognizing propaganda and disinformation, and polishing and everyday objects. Alongside these primary sources, we discuss theoretical grammar and style, will inform students' own writing (four 5-page papers). We pieces from the field of performance studies in order to expose and reflect will read works from the 19th century to the late