Course	RUS 106 Russian Intensive
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	16169
Schedule	M Tu W 10:00 - 12:00 pm OLINLC 115 Fr 10:00 - 12:00 pm OLINLC 206
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. On-line

Course	RUS 207 Continuing Russian II
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
CRN	16429
Schedule	Tu Wed Th 3:10 -4:10 pm OLINLC 118
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	16312
Schedule	Th 7:00 -9:20 pm OLIN 202
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

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 YuriTynyanov; 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	LIT 2162 Fictional Writers and the Russian Metatext
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	16166
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30 -2:50 pm ASP 302
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Fiction in which the main character is a writer, or in which the narrator refers explicitly to the process of writing, often takes on a self-referential function. What does it mean to write about writing? What can a fictional text whose subject is fictional texts tell us about the potential of language as a self-shaping tool, or about the role of art in a given cultural context? In this course we will employ such metatextual questions as a way to guide our study of fiction by major Russian authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In reading Russian novels and stories that admit and examine the very process of their own creation, we will be in a unique position to explore notions of selfhood and to trace ways in which Russians have understood themselves best precisely through reading and writing. We will use literary theories on genre, irony, aesthetics and the reader-writer-character triangle in our linkage of construction of self to construction of text, particularly in fiction that experiments with forms such as the fictional diary or the complex frame narrative. Authors to be read include Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Zamyatin, Bulgakov, and Nabokov. Conducted in English. On-line

Course	RUS 409 Russian Poetry
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
CRN	16475
Schedule	Th 9:30 – 11:50 am OLIN 310
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature, & Culture

This course covers a historical study of Russian versification, a study of the technical aspects of poetry, structural analysis of poetic texts and translation of selected poems. Poets include Pushkin, Lermontov, Baratynsky, Tiutchev, Fet, Blok, Balmont, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Mayakovsky, Tarkovsky, Brodsky, Rein, Schwarts and others. Conducted in Russian.