Course	RUS 106 Russian Intensive
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	15184
Schedule	M T W Th 10:00 - 12:00 pm Olin L.C. 210
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, & Culture

8 credits This intensive course is designed as a continuation for students who have completed Beginning Russian 101. Our focus on speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills continues through cultural context, video materials, songs, and literary analysis. This course culminates in a 4-week June program in St. Petersburg, where students will attend classes (earning an additional 4 credits) and participate in a cultural program while living in Russian families. Successful completion of the intensive sequence qualifies the student to pursue semester or yearlong study in St. Petersburg at Smolny College of the Liberal Arts, a joint educational venture of Bard and St. Petersburg University.

Course	RUS 207 Continuing Russian II
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	15185
Schedule	M T Th 3:00 -4:20 pm Olin L.C. 208
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, & Culture

This course is designed to continue refining and engaging students’ practice of speaking, reading, and writing Russian. Advanced grammar topics will be addressed through a wide variety of texts and contexts, with emphasis on literary analysis and Russian in the modern press. Students will expand their vocabulary and range of stylistic nuance by writing regular response papers and presenting oral reports. The course will be structured around a semester-long group project that will provide an opportunity to research aspects of modern Russian culture, be in video contact with Smolny students, and analyze/present findings in a collaborative creative effort such as a play, a “news broadcast,” or newspaper.

Course	LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule
Professor	Jonathan Brent
CRN	15381
Schedule	Th 7:00 – 9:20 pm OLIN 201
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

This course will examine the fate of the literary imagination in Russia from the time of the Revolution to the stagnation of the Brezhnev period. We will look at the majestic, triumphant imaginative liberation in writers such as Isaac Babel, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam and Mikhail Bulgakov; the struggle with ideology and the Terror of the 1930s in Yuri Olesha, Anna Akhmatova, Lidia Chukovskaya, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Varlam Shalamov, Boris Pilnyak and Yuri Tynyanov; the hesitant Thaw as reflected in Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago; and the course will conclude by reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Moscow to the End of the Line, by Venedikt Erofeev. Readings of literary works will be supplemented with political and historical documents to provide a sense of the larger political-social-historical context in which they were written. After the violent, imaginative ebullience of the Revolutionary period, how did literature stay alive during the darkest period of mass repression, censorship and terror when millions of Soviet citizens were either imprisoned or shot? What formal/aesthetic choices did these writers make in negotiating the demands of official ideology and Party discipline, on the one hand, and authentic literary expression, on the other? What image of history and of man did these “Engineers of human souls” produce? These are some of the questions we will ask and seek to answer. All readings will be in English.

Course	FLCL 405 Word and Nationality: Tolerance in Post-Soviet Literature
Professor	Maria Rybakova
CRN	15489
Schedule	Mon 4:30 – 7:00 pm OLIN 303
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, & Culture

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies 

After the USSR was dissolved, it became clear that Russians still had many features of the “homo soveticus” that had been formed through the 1930s -70s. Among other things, despite the official ideology of internationalism and propaganda of “friendship among peoples,” the Soviet and post-Soviet Russian still exhibited xenophobia, antisemitism, and aggressive fear of the “other.” He seeks isolation from the world and sees himself as both underdog and superman at the same time. On the other hand, after the fall of communist ideology, Russians became better acquainted with religion, the philosophy of humanism, and the history of their own country. In the present situation in Russia, “others” are often seen not as neighbors, but as enemies in the ethnic, sexual, and even aesthetic sense. These feelings have been intensified by the war in Chechnya and the presence of many refugees and migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia. On the other hand, many Russians have themselves had the experience of being foreign workers in or immigrants to other countries, giving rise to a new sense of the humanitarian aspects and the overall complexity of the problem. A growing interest in their own land and a new exploration of Russia by Russians has fueled new explorations of the concept of Russia as a multi-ethnic country. In this seminar, we plan to analyze several approaches to the topic of “self” and “other” in contemporary Russian literature: human (Fasil Iskander, Svetlana Alexievich), dehumanization (Vladimir Sorokin), suspension of judgement (Vladimir Makanin, Asar Eppel), grotesque (Viacheslav Pietsukh, Yuri Bujda), adaptation (Anastasia Gosteva), understanding (Marina Paley), contrast (Liudmila Petrushevskaya), self-sacrifice (Nina Gorlanova), stress (Anatoly Gavrilov); and, on the other hand, the Russian himself as “other” in another country (Maria Rybakova). Students will have the opportunity to present and discuss examples of their own creative writing. Conducted in English. (A section in Russian will be offered to fluent speakers.)