Melissa Frazier

While Dostoevsky is often praised for the universality of his themes, in his own day he was a working journalist deeply engaged with the issues facing his own contemporary Russia. This course will seek to contextualize a few of Dostoevsky’s major works by reading them as they were originally written: as part of an ongoing and often heated debate with his contemporaries. We will begin with the distinction between the 1840s and the 1860s that Dostoevsky made famous first in Notes from Underground (1864), then moving on to read Crime and Punishment (1866) and Demons (1872) in the context of the intense debates that drove the latter decade. Our particular focus will be Russian nihilism, above all as it was defined by Turgenev and Chernyshevsky, and also the “woman question,” especially as developed in the works of two women writers, Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya and Sofiia Kovalevskaya. We will finish with Nabokov’s extravagant send-up of Chernyshevsky and Russian nihilism in The Gift (1938).

This course will read Romanticism as a precursor to our own era of postmodernism. The starting point will be the French Deconstructionist reading of Friedrich Schlegel and his short-lived journal, Athenaeum (1798-1800). As Maurice Blanchot argues, among the many contradictions “out of which romanticism unfolds—contradictions that contribute to making literature no longer a response but a question,” perhaps most significant is that “romantic art, which concentrates creative truth in the freedom of the subject, also formulates the ambition of a total book, a sort of perpetually growing Bible that will not represent but, rather, replace the real.” We will take Blanchot’s insight as our guide in reading an otherwise disparate collection of texts ranging across Romantic time and space. From Germany, besides Schlegel’s aphorisms, we will read Hoffmann’s The Sandman (1816) and The Golden Pot (1814); from Great Britain, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Byron’s Don Juan (1819), and Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818); from Poland, Potocki’s The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1814); from Russia, Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter (1836) and Eugene Onegin (1833), Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1841), and Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842); and from the United States, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Along the way, we will periodically depart from the 19th century to emphasize the ways that Romanticism underpins what we take to be our own postmodernist thought. As a response to Don Juan, we will read Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia. Together with Frankenstein, we will read Jeanette Winterson’s 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story; and will end on a ship-faring note, as we juxtapose Moby Dick with Maggie Nelson’s gender- and genre-bending The Argonauts (2015).

At a time of great crisis in Russia and in Ukraine, the study of Russian remains essential to the understanding of Russian politics, history, and culture. It is also an easy move from Russian to the study of other Slavic languages, including not just Ukrainian but also Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, etc. To learn a new language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity change. As English speakers find themselves in Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. Even as I encourage students to reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, I also ask that they engage in basic, but fully-functional, conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in both pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, weekly individual meetings with a Russian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged. 

At a time of great crisis in Russia and in Ukraine, the study of Russian remains essential to the understanding of Russian politics, history, and culture. It is also an easy move from Russian to the study of other Slavic languages, including not just Ukrainian but also Belarusian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, etc. To learn a new language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity change. As English speakers find themselves in Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. As students reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, they will engage in basic, but fully functional, conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in both pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. Weekly individual meetings with a Russian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged. In fall and spring, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Ahead of intermediate study, students already know the basics of Russian grammar; thus, this course will emphasize grammar review, ever more vocabulary, and more speaking of what is already known. We will turn to more reading, starting with a variety of texts with a strong oral orientation. Past studied texts have included: Daniil Kharms’ absurdist play, The Circus Shardam; the Soviet children’s classic, Mister Twister; and the famous Russian translation of Winnie the Pooh. At the end of this course, students should feel that they have a fairly sophisticated grasp of the language. Students will also participate in individual conference work with the instructor. While students may incorporate films and/or music into their conference projects, the hope of this one-on-one time is to prioritize additional reading, including song lyrics and/or screenplays, as well as poetry and short stories. As cultural opportunities in Russia remain limited, students will also be encouraged to use conference to explore the more broadly postcolonial but russophone world. As the crisis in Russia and Ukraine continues, that is where the interesting questions are being asked. Regular written homework will be required, along with weekly conversation sessions with the Russian assistant. Attendance at weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged.

The Russian and African American literary traditions are marked by intersections as well as by affinities. As the African American press was already well aware in the 19th century, the great Russian poet and founder of the Russian literary tradition, Alexander Pushkin, was of partly African descent—a fact that he celebrated in his own writing. As, again, both Russians and African Americans recognized, the parallel institutions of serfdom and slavery ended at almost the same time: Serfs in Russia were emancipated in 1861; slaves in the United States, in 1863. In the 20th century, the Soviet experiment proved enormously appealing for African Americans seeking to escape the limitations of American racism; and, while Soviet writers explored issues of blackness, Black Americans traveled to the USSR. As significant as these points of intersection are, the two traditions are most strikingly marked by a similarly complicated approach to literary identity—what Fyodor Dostoevsky called “double thoughts” and W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” Just as African American writers in the 20th century wrote from a position on the margins of American culture, so Russians in the 19th century wrote from the edge of a European tradition that didn’t—and, in many respects, still doesn’t—include them. Besides Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Du Bois, writers/cultural figures considered in this class will include Nikolai Gogol, Edward P. Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Paul Robeson. Note: As part of this “large seminar,” students will meet for biweekly conference in groups of three-to-five to pursue a course of reading intended to extend and deepen our class work. While students will be invited to offer their own suggestions, topics for small-group conferences might include: Serfdom and Slavery (Peter Kochin, Orlando Patterson, serf and slave narratives); Folk Authenticity (Gogol, I. S. Turgenev, Charles Chesnutt, Hurston); Black Americans and Red Russia (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, the 1936 Soviet film Circus, M. I. Tsvetaeva, M. A. Bulgakov); Russian Revolution and Utopian Dreams (N. G. Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, A. Platonov); More Dostoevsky and/or Dostoevsky in other comparative contexts, including Richard Wright and French Existentialism; War and Peace and Russian identity; Ukraine/Eastern Europe Writes Back (A. Kurkov, S. Zhadan, E. Belorusets, O. Tokarczuk, S. Alexeivich, V. Martinowich)....

The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian and Soviet empires, as well as in the post-Soviet space, has often gone unnoticed in the West. As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue. This course will draw on some historical context while centering our attention on the extraordinary flowering of contemporary Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature. We will begin with the Polish context and Adam Mickiewicz’s long narrative poem, Pan Tadeusz (1834), written at a time when Poland had been wiped off the map as an independent state. We will then shift to the 20th century to take in cultural production in and around World War II, still a touchstone for this part of the world, including the blend of the real and the fantastic in the short stories of Bruno Schulz, as well as Andrzej Wajda’s tribute to the Solidarity movement in his 1977 film, Man of Marble. We will then turn to the 21st century and two novels by the 2018 Nobel prize winner, Olga Tokarczuk: Flights (2007) and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead (2009). In our reading of Ukrainian literature, we will again start with a 19th-century poet, Taras Shevchenko, as well as Nikolai Gogol, a Ukrainian who has long been read as a canonical figure in the Russian tradition. We will then jump to the late 20th and early 21st centuries with Oksana Zabuzhko’s influential Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), as well as works by writers including Evgenia Belorusets, Serhiy Zhadan, and Andriy Kurkov. We will end the course with a brief look at the Belarusian tradition, starting with World War II and the short stories of Soviet-Belarusian writer Vasil Bykau (in Russian, Vasil Bykov), as well as Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko’s adaptation of Bykau’s The Ordeal in her 1977 film, The Ascent. We will then read Voices From Chernobyl (1997) by another recent Nobel prize winner, Svetlana Alexievich, before finishing with Alhierd Baharevich and the extraordinary decision of his translators to echo Baharevich’s own use of two different languages in Alindarka's Children (2014)—in Petra Reid and Jim Dingley’s 2020 translation, the Russian language of the novel is translated into English and the Belarusian into Scots.

“Once it's proved to you, for example, that you are descended from an ape, there’s no use making a wry face; just take it for what it is,” the Underground Man says; Lebeziatnikov, in Crime and Punishment, attempts to educate the prostitute Sonia by lending her a copy of G. H. Lewes’s pioneering work in physiological psychology, The Physiology of Common Life. Ivan Karamazov rejects non-Euclidean geometry, while his brother Dmitrii worries that chemistry will displace God: “Move over a little, Your Reference, there’s no help for it, chemistry’s coming!” This one-semester course will frame a rich and multifaceted reading of Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Brothers Karamazov with an exploration of Dostoevsky’s complicated view of the interrelationships of mind and body and mind and material world. We will consider Dostoevsky’s response in the context of the very many of his contemporaries engaged in a new discourse of science, including his main ideological opponent, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, as well as writers whose more sophisticated approach helped shape Dostoevsky’s own: Balzac, Poe, Wilkie Collins, Dickens, George Eliot. We will also read some of the scientists and science writers whose works both influenced and were influenced by 19th-century European literature, including Darwin; French philosopher Auguste Comte and physiologist Claude Bernard; American philosopher, scientist, and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce; and the English George Henry Lewes—the last-named not just a favorite of the fictional Lebeziatnikov but the common-law husband of the real George Eliot. As part of the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course collaborative, we will also finally put our own bodies and minds to work in the material world. While students are welcome to devote conference time to further work in literature and/or the intersections of literature and science, fieldwork addressing current issues in the environment is also encouraged. Over the course of the semester, we will also bring Dostoevsky and the insights of 19th-century science and politics to a wider audience as we participate in two two-week interludes devoted to climate justice and involving collaborative projects and research together with students and faculty from across the College and at Bronx Community College.

Henry James called them “baggy monsters”; for the Vicomte de Vogüé, they were not Romans, but Russians. This course will argue that the Russian novel is marked above all by its persistent posing of the question of form. We will begin with Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and also with Tolstoy’s essay, “A Few Words About War and Peace,” which claims that War and Peace is not a novel but only the latest in a long line of 19th-century Russian non-novels, including Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, Gogol’s Dead Souls, and Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead. We will read all of these works and more, as we attempt to answer the double question that Tolstoy raises—not just “What is the ‘novel’?” but also “What do we mean by ‘Russia’?”

To learn another language is to open yourself to another worldview, both as you gain entry into another culture and as your own sense of self is transformed. In another language, you are still you; but the tools that you use to create and express that identity do change. As English speakers find themselves in Russia and learning Russian, they first need to come to terms with an often complicated grammar. We will tackle that aspect of our work through a degree of analytical thought, a great deal of memorization, and the timely completion of our often lengthy, biweekly homework assignments. Even as I encourage students to reflect on the very different means of expression that Russian offers, I also ask that they engage in basic—but fully functional—conversational Russian at every point along the way. Our four hours of class each week will be devoted to actively using what we know in pair and group activities, role play, dialogues, skits, songs, etc. As a final project at the end of each semester, students will create their own video skits. In addition to class, students are required to meet weekly with the Russian assistant; attendance at our weekly Russian Table is strongly encouraged.