Course	RUS 106 Russian Intensive
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	17405
Schedule	Mon Tu Wed Fr 10:00- 12:00 pm Olin LC 118
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 registration

Course	RUS 207 Continuing Russian II
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky
CRN	17443
Schedule	Tu Wed Th 1:25-2:25 pm Olin LC 210
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 are addressed through a wide variety of texts and contexts, with emphasis on literary analysis and the modern press. Students expand their vocabulary and range of stylistic nuance by writing response papers and presenting oral reports. Study includes a semester-long project that provides an opportunity to build our own Web design dictionary; to research aspects of modern Russian culture; and to present findings in a collaborative creative effort, such as a play, “news broadcast”, or a concert.

Course	LIT 2151 St. Petersburg: City as Text
Professor	Jennifer Day
CRN	17385
Schedule	Mon Wed 1:30-2:50 pm Preston 128
Distribution	OLD: B/D	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian Studies

The magical and terrible spaces of St. Petersburg have inspired Russian writers and artists as well as confounded the Russian quest for an integral national identity ever since Peter the Great founded the city in 1703. This course examines the "myth" of St. Petersburg in Russian literature and culture with consideration not only of how the city has been constructed as a literary, artistic, and folkloric text, but of how the city itself has determined the course of Russian culture and Russian selfhood. Special critical attention is given to the nature of the city as a "sign," with appropriate strategies for "reading" the city in a variety of artistic and philosophical mediums. Readings range from the classic Petersburg texts of Pushkin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky to twentieth-century interpretations in prose, poetry, memoirs, film, and carnival performance associated with the city's 300th-year anniversary celebrations. Conducted in English. On-line registration

Course	LIT 2159 Into the Whirlwind: Literary Greatness and Gambles under Soviet Rule
Professor	Jonathan Brent
CRN	17382
Schedule	Tu 7:00-9:20 pm Olin 202
Distribution	OLD: B	NEW: Literature in English

Cross-listed: Russian and Eurasian StudiesThis 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 ofmass 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. On-line registration

Course	RUS 340 Russia on the Opera Stage
Professor	Marina Kostalevsky / Yelena Kodorthovsky
CRN	17445
Schedule	Wed 9:00- 11:00 am HDR 302
Distribution	OLD: D	NEW: Foreign Language, Literature & Culture

Cross-listed: Music, Russian and Eurasian Studies

Modern Russian culture, although it represents an inseparable part of European culture, has a distinctly original character, initially shaped by the Orthodox Christian tradition passed on from Byzantium. This tradition eventually came into contact and conflict with the flow of West European ideas. The monumental achievements of European civilization were absorbed and confronted, transformed and blended with the unique Russian experience. The history of Russian music predictably echoed that path. The early development of Russian music benefited from appropriation of the Byzantine unaccompanied choral singing and at the same time suffered from the absence of instrumental music. By comparison, the Western European music combined the use of vocal and instrumental faculties and resulted in the creation of numerous forms of musical art, including the most elaborate one: opera. The flourishing of this genre in Europe consequently had direct impact on the progress of musical life in Russia; during the nineteenth century, opera became the main agent for (using Richard Taruskin's apt words ) "defining Russia musically." The course will offer the students an opportunity to explore Russian culture through the medium of Russian opera. The material will include selected literary texts, musical recordings, and opera performances on video. This course is one of the first being offered under the auspices of the Bard-Smolny Virtual Campus Project. Students will participate in experimenting with using innovative technologies, including live videoconferencing, to establish direct exchange between students at Bard and students taking the same course in parallel at Smolny College in St. Petersburg, Russia. Conducted in Russian.