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 15 students. Spring semester. Professor Rabinowitz, with Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.
(Offered as ARHA 244 and RUSS 244) This course will explore the various trajectories of “performance” in Russia throughout the twentieth century. The medium of performance was central to several crucial episodes in the history of Russian visual art, including Futurism, World of Art, Moscow Conceptualism, Sots Art, and Moscow Actionism. Russian performance art developed alongside achievements in the adjacent modes of dance, theater, and music. Yet, performance was also a significant phenomenon within Russian culture more broadly.
Count Leo Tolstoy’s life and writings encompass self-contradictions equaled in scale only by the immensity of his talent: the aristocrat who renounced his wealth, the former army officer who preached nonresistance to evil, the father of thirteen children who advocated total chastity within marriage and, of course, the writer of titanic stature who repudiated all he had previously written, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina.
An examination of major Russian writers and literary trends from about 1860 to the Bolshevik Revolution as well as a sampling of Russian émigré literature through a reading of representative novels, stories, and plays in translation. Readings include important works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Sologub, Bely, and Nabokov. The evaluation of recurring themes such as the breakdown of the family, the “woman question,” madness, attitudes toward the city, childhood and perception of youth. Conducted in English.
Continuation of RUSS 201.
Requisite: RUSS 201 or equivalent. Limited to 15 students. Spring semester. Senior Lecturer Babyonyshev.
Continuation of RUSS 101.
Requisite: RUSS 101 or equivalent. Limited to 15 students per section. Spring semester. Five College Lecturer Dengub.
Independent Reading Course. Reading in an area selected by the student and approved in advance by a member of the Department.
Fall and spring semester. The Department.
(Offered as RELI 285 and ASLC 356 [WA]) This course is a survey of the large complex of Islamic intellectual and social perspectives subsumed under the term Sufism. Sufi mystical philosophies, liturgical practices, and social organizations have been a major part of the Islamic tradition in all historical periods, and Sufism has also served as a primary creative force behind Islamic aesthetic expression in poetry, music, and the visual arts.
(Offered as RELI 352 and ASLC 352.) A systematic exploration of the place of ethics and moral reasoning in Buddhist thought and practice. The scope of the course is wide, with examples drawn from the whole Buddhist world, but emphasis is on the particularity of different Buddhist visions of the ideal human life. Attention is given to the problems of the proper description of Buddhist ethics in a comparative perspective.
Spring semester. Professor M. Heim.
