Melissa Frazier

At the end of this course, students will know the fundamentals of Russian grammar and will be able to use them to read, write, and, above all, speak Russian on an elementary level. Successful language learning involves both creativity and a certain amount of rote learning—memorization gives the student the basis to then extrapolate, improvise, and have fun with the language—and this course will lay equal emphasis on both. Our four hours of class each week will be spent actively using what we know in pair and group activities, dialogues, discussions, etc. Twice-weekly written homework, serving both to reinforce old and to introduce new material, will be required. At the end of each semester, we will formalize the principle of rigorous but creative communication that underlies all of our work through small-group video projects. Students are also required to attend weekly meetings with the Russian assistant; attendance at Russian Table is strongly encouraged.

At the end of this course, students should feel that they have a fairly sophisticated grasp of Russian and the ability to communicate in Russian in any situation. After the first year of studying the language, students will have learned the bulk of Russian grammar; this course will emphasize grammar review, vocabulary accumulation, and regular oral practice. Class time will center on the spoken language, and students will be expected to participate actively in discussions based on new vocabulary. Regular written homework will be required, along with weekly conversation classes with the Russian assistant. Attendance at Russian Table is strongly encouraged. Conference work will focus on the written language. Students will be asked to read short texts by the author(s) of their choice, with the aim of appreciating a very different culture and/or literature while learning to read independently, accurately, and with as little recourse to the dictionary as possible.

Henry James called them “baggy monsters.” For the Vicomte de Vogüé, they were not romans but russ-ans. 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 these works and more, as we attempt to answer the double question that Tolstoy raises: not just what is the “novel,” but also what we mean by “Russia.”

In his 1984 essay “Catastrophes in the Air,” the poet Joseph Brodsky suggests that, as its “every sentence drives the Russian language into a semantic dead end or, more precisely, reveals a proclivity for dead ends, a blind-alley mentality in the language itself,” Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930) can be profitably read as a sequel to Dostoevsky’s Demons (1872). This course will frame a reading of Russian literature both before and after the 1917 Revolution with Brodsky’s insight. We will begin not with Demons but with the most important revolutionary and utopian text in Russian literature, Chernyshevsky’s novel-manifesto, What Is To Be Done? (1863). In response to Chernyshevsky, we will turn first to Demons and then to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) before considering Andrei Bely’s attempt in Petersburg (1916) to write both an explosion into the 20th century and also a culmination of all that has come before. We will then read from the wild burst of creativity in the 1920s as Russian literature fragmented into smaller forms—Shklovsky’s Sentimental Journey (1923), Zamiatin’s We (1924), Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926), Olesha’s Envy (1927)—before finishing with The Foundation Pit and what Brodsky sees as its essentially Dostoevskiian message: “Language is a millenarian device, history isn't.”