The contemporary Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk claimed in 1999 that “the book of the millennium is Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov.

A half course designed for intermediate-level students who wish to develop their fluency, pronunciation, oral comprehension, and writing skills. We will study and discuss Russian films of various genres. Two hours per week.

Requisite: RUSS 301 or consent of the instructor. Spring semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.

We will be reading, in the original Russian, works of fiction, poetry and criticism by nineteenth-century authors such as Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov. Conducted in Russian, with frequent writing and translation assignments.

Requisite: RUSS 301 or consent of the instructor. Limited to 12 students. Spring semester. Professor Kunichika.

(Offered as RUSS 254 and ENGL 314) The problem with facts is that they can be unwieldy, unbelievable, and also unknowable. The problem with fiction is that it doesn’t have the veracity of facts. Or does it? It is commonplace that fiction can be truer than nonfiction. That, in turn, raises the question of what truth is. The Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich has talked about the “emotional truth” of her books, the factual accuracy of which has been questioned.

(Offered as RUSS 252, BLST 392 [D] and FAMS 352) This course focuses on the modes by which race has been represented in Russian and Soviet culture.

(Offered as HIST 240 [EU], EUST 240, and RUSS 240) This course explores the tumultuous and unprecedented transition from the late Soviet Communism to contemporary Russian Federation.

We will examine the revolutionary upheavals of early twentieth-century Russia through the lens of three modernist texts: Andrei Bely’s experimental novel Petersburg (the failed revolution of 1905), Isaac Babel’s story cycle Red Cavalry (the civil war that followed the Bolshevik takeover in 1917) and Mikhail Bulgakov’s phantasmagorical masterpiece The Master and Margarita (the “cultural revolution” of 1929-32 and the rise of Stalinist society).

Continuation of RUSS 201.

Requisite: RUSS 201 or equivalent. Limited to 12 students. Spring semester. Professor Ciepiela.