REES121F Queering Russian Music

How have the sexuality of a Russian composer Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky and international success of a popular music duo t.A.T.u. shaped the understanding of gender, sexuality, and queerness in the Russian context? This entry-level course introduces a variety of theoretical and journalistic approaches and presents a historical overview of Russian music centered around queerness, gender, sexuality, and power. Using methodologies of queer studies and queer theory, we will examine a variety of musical genres and musicians ranging from Imperial Russia to the present-day Russian popular and film music. The topics will focus on women composers, queer genres, queer sexual and musical identity.



Selected personalities examined in the course:

Catherine II (the Great), Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvolskaya, Alla Pugacheva, Zemfira, t.A.T.u, Pussy Riot, AIGEL, Little Big, Manizha, Oxxxymiron, ICEPEAK
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC121F
Prereq: None

REES200 Histories of Ukraine

Over the course of its history, Ukraine has been a site of multiple political projects and diverse historical experiences. As a concept that encompasses a specific territory, it has also been a space where multiple communities--Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, and Poles--have histories. This course will look at how these histories have been shaped by and alongside one another, and the kind of political programs, obstacles, and possibilities that have emerged through these encounters. It will ask why Ukraine and its history have been the subject of so much confusion and controversy, and examine the concepts (nation, state, people, culture) that transform a space into a place, a land into a home.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST200
Prereq: None

REES204 Entangled Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments of Central Asia

Musical instruments exist at the intersection of material, cultural, and social worlds. Entangled in webs of human and non-human relationships, they are at once tangible and symbolic sounding objects that hold significant meanings for the communities they serve. This course will explore the social roles and cultural meanings of musical instruments in Central Asia, a region once traversed by the Silk Road, which extends from the borderlands of China in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west, and from Russia in the north to the frontiers of Afghanistan in the south.



Drawing on theories and ideas derived from interdisciplinary studies of material and sound culture, the course will examine how instrument making and performance are shaped by and entangled with social systems of value and cosmology, political ideology, ecology, and economy. Class meetings will focus on case studies of bowed and plucked lutes, zithers, mouth harps, end-blown flutes, and frame drums among historically nomadic and sedentary peoples of Central Asia. Through these case studies, students will learn about the origins and historical trajectories of individual musical instruments from the pre-modern period to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras; consider the social and political connotations of various performance configurations and repertoires; discuss the status of instruments in Islam and indigenous spiritual belief-systems, and the roles of musical instruments as symbols of national identity, objects of cultural heritage, and global commodities.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM304, ANTH304, FGSS346
Prereq: None

REES205 Murder and Adultery: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the 19th-Century Russian Novel

The 19th-century novel is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Russian literature. This course will trace its development from Pushkin's elegant, witty novel in verse, EUGENE ONEGIN, through the grotesque comedy of Gogol, to the realist masterpieces of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with their complex depiction of human psychology and the philosophical struggles of late 19th-century society. We will consider the historical background in which the novels were produced and the tools developed by Russian critical theory, especially the Russian formalists and Mikhail Bakhtin, for understanding 19th-century Russian prose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS205, RULE205, WLIT241
Prereq: None

REES208F Otherness & Belonging (FYS)

One of the many haunting utterances of Fyodor Dostoevsky's most famous antihero, the Underground Man, is "I am alone, I thought, and they are everyone." Like him, the other protagonists of this course are outcasts, dissidents, and strangers - jaded office clerks and repressed misanthropes, queer activists and "enemies of the state" - who refuse to conform to societal norms, disrupt conventions by saying the unsayable, and write and make art from the margins, the realm of undesirables. Focusing mainly on Russia and Eastern Europe, we will analyze representations of otherness and belonging in fiction, non-fiction, and film. We will explore narratives of undesirability through the thematic prisms of exile and immigration; gender and sexuality; mental illness; prison writing; ethnic difference; religion; and unrequited love. The concept of undesirability will also be our point of entry for constructing arguments about community, privilege, and a society without outsiders.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RULE208F, RUSS208F, WLIT245F
Prereq: None

REES216 Secularism: Godlessness from Luther to Lenin

Secularism is more than just the absence of religion. It is a political and ideological project with a long history that seeks to separate political and religious authority and imagines whether human life can be richer without religion. This course traces the idea and ideal of secularism as an ideological project from classic Enlightenment philosophers to contemporary critics. We begin with Martin Luther's arguments for the separation of church and state, examine utopian ideals of secular humanism in Mill, Locke, Hume, and Marx. We then trace how these philosophies were embodied in state-sponsored atheism in the Soviet Union and how secularism came to stand for religious freedom during the Cold War. Finally, we examine critiques of the secular project (such as Asad, Mahmood, and others), focusing on secularism as a realpolitik approach to governing multireligious societies and the idea of religious freedom as a universal human right. This is a seminar focused on close readings of philosophical and critical texts. Assignments include reading responses and reflective essays.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI271
Prereq: None

REES219 Russian and Soviet History, 1881 to the Present

Reversals of fortune have defined Russian history perhaps more so than for any other nation. Though the Russian Empire began the 19th century as an emerging European superpower that defeated Napoleon, it ended that same century as a backward state plagued by political, economic, and social strife that ultimately brought the Romanov dynasty to a revolutionary collapse. A similar trajectory describes the "short" Soviet 20th century that began with the promise of a qualitatively new political order that sought to transform social relations and human nature and concluded with a spectacular implosion that some heralded as the end of history itself.



This course will follow the story of how the Soviet Union emerged from the ruins of the Russian imperial order to become the world's first socialist society, the most serious challenge to imperialism, liberalism, and capitalism, and, arguably, modernity's greatest political experiment. We will cover the following topics: the emergence and fate of Russian national identity; the origins and dynamics of Russia's revolutions; the political, economic, and cultural challenges of the Soviet project; the role of the party and ideology in politics and everyday life; the nationalities question and the challenges of governing a socialist empire; Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War and the rebirth of the nation (and nationalism); the emergence of the Soviet Union as a Cold War superpower; the country's historic attempts to reform (and the frequent failure of these attempts); and the dynamics of the system's collapse.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST219
Prereq: None

REES220 Speak, Memory: The Russian Memoir

Memoirs offer a chance for individuals to make sense of their relationship to larger historical forces and allow writers of fiction and poetry to reflect on the tensions between biography and the creative process. We will read memoirs of prison and of Stalinist terror by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam; visions of childhood by Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and poets Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva; and works of autobiography by Viktor Shklovsky and Sergey Gandlevsky that create their own worlds of literary experimentation. The course will also consider the theoretical problems of autobiographical writing. Students will write a memoir of childhood (3-5 pages) to better understand the technical problems faced by Tolstoy in writing about his childhood. Students will also write a piece of memoiristic prose, or a parody or imitation of one of the writers in the course (minimum 10 pages), as one of their three papers. We will devote one class session to a writing workshop session on the creative project.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS220, RULE220, WLIT243
Prereq: None

REES221 Queering Russian Music

How have the sexuality of a Russian composer Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky and international success of a popular music duo t.A.T.u. shaped the understanding of gender, sexuality, and queerness in the Russian context? This entry-level course introduces a variety of theoretical and journalistic approaches and presents a historical overview of Russian music centered around queerness, gender, sexuality, and power. Using methodologies of queer studies and queer theory, we will examine a variety of musical genres and musicians ranging from Imperial Russia to the present-day Russian popular and film music. The topics will focus on women composers, queer genres, queer sexual and musical identity.



Selected personalities examined in the course:

Catherine II (the Great), Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvolskaya, Alla Pugacheva, Zemfira, t.A.T.u, Pussy Riot, AIGEL, Little Big, Manizha, Oxxxymiron, ICEPEAK
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC121, RUSS221
Prereq: None

REES222 Russian and American Poetic Encounters

The fascination of Russian poets with American authors, and the curiosity of Anglophone poets about the culture of Russia and the USSR, are trends that accompany the turbulent twentieth century, when the political relationships between Russia and the USA were largely inimical. But it was also a period when poetry mattered. In this course, we will focus on some of the most significant poets of the twentieth century.



We will study six Russian poets (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Olga Sedakova, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko), and six American poets (William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian), and also one Caribbean poet (Derek Walcott).



We will learn how to analyze lyric poetry, and how to study it comparatively. We will explore the poets' dialogues with each other across cultures. For example, we will learn how Mayakovsky's "ladder" might have influenced Williams' vers libre, or how Joseph Brodsky learned T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in poetry even though Eliot was banned in the USSR. We will also explore where poetry and politics meet. For example, we will discuss why Langston Hughes found his visit to the USSR inspirational as an African-American poet, and we will see whether the myth that Robert Frost's visit to the USSR contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis is true.



The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RULE222, RUSS222, ENGL238, WLIT267
Prereq: None

REES223 After Communism: Animals, Avatars, Hybrids

During the last two decades of the 20th century, a wide array of Soviet and post-Soviet writers either replaced or merged the traditional human protagonist with another: the animal. Whether featuring a penguin avatar or disillusioned insects; a human centipede or a pack of werewolves, these literary works directly and indirectly shed light on the historical context in which they were written: the last decade before and the one immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Keeping in mind this historical and social context, we will analyze representations of hybridity, violence, sexuality, and (imagined) communities--all through texts that challenge us to consider what the animal represents and how it affects our expectations of narrative. The secondary readings will situate the animal in a broader philosophical and theoretical framework, and special attention will be paid to postmodernism as a movement in literature and art. Conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: RUSS223, RULE223, WLIT256
Prereq: None

REES224 Performing Russian Culture: From Peter the Great to the Russian Revolution

This course offers a survey of Russian culture from 1700-1917 through the perspective of performance studies. Starting with the reign of Peter the Great and ending on the eve of the revolution, we read some of the seminal works of the Russian literary canon, including plays, poems, short stories, and novels. We also consider examples from visual and material culture: paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects. Alongside these primary sources, we discuss theoretical pieces from the field of performance studies in order to expose and reflect on the social and political mechanisms embedded in the shaping of various forms of "Russianness." The course will explore ever-relevant questions of belonging, display of power, and ideology, and ask how, why, and by whom cultural identities are contrived and performed. The course is conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: RUSS224, WLIT257, RULE224
Prereq: None

REES225F Socialist Utopias: Transcendence and Religion in Communist States (FYS)

Socialism is a political system predicated on building a better future by transcending the present. But what kind of utopias were imagined in and by actual socialist states like the Soviet Union? Why was atheism so central to Marx's vision of socialism, and what kinds of futures did communists imagine were possible, once religion was removed from society? What kinds of transcendence did communists imagine would exist once they transcended religion? What kinds of religious practices were enabled despite and sometimes because of the state's repression of organized religion? We will read some Marx, some Soviet science fiction as well as ethnographies, ranging from studies that explore how communism is and isn't like a religion, how former atheists became missionaries, how some religious communities survived communism, how mangos became Mao's relics, how Vietnamese spirit mediums channel Ho Chi Minh, and what kinds of imaginaries can flourish in post-socialist ruins like Moscow and Silicon Valley.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI225F
Prereq: None

REES226 Documentary Fictions

How stable is the binary distinction between the documentary and the fictional? Is fiction's claim to representing reality any less valid than that of non-fiction? How does creative non-fiction conjure the sense of the Real? Can an archival document convey the depth of spiritual, emotional, and aesthetically infused intimacy on its own? What happens when the documentary and the fictional overlap to produce competing versions of the Real? What is at stake in such an overlap when the competing versions of the Real vie for a definitive, true account of events past and present?



This class investigates various genres of storytelling that appeal to the documentary and the factual in pursuit of authenticity: propaganda, counter-propaganda, conspiracy theories, political and artistic manifestos, historical fiction and cinema, diary writing, autobiography and memoir, and documentary photography and film. Focusing geographically on East-Central Europe and Russia and chronologically on the last 100 years, the class will take up such thematic units as civil war, socialist realism, capitalist realism, the deaths of dictators, revolutionary hagiography, homefront narratives, and survivor testimony.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM323, RUSS226, COL322
Prereq: None

REES230 Socialist Utopias: Transcendence and Religion in Communist States

Socialism is a political system predicated on building a better future by transcending the present. But what kind of utopias were imagined in and by actual socialist states like the Soviet Union? Why was atheism so central to Marx's vision of socialism, and what kinds of futures did communists imagine were possible, once religion was removed from society? What kinds of transcendence did communists imagine would exist once they transcended religion? What kinds of religious practices were enabled despite and sometimes because of the state's repression of organized religion? We will read some Marx and some Soviet science fiction as well as ethnographies, ranging from studies that explore how communism is and isn't like a religion, how former atheists became missionaries, how some religious communities survived communism, how mangoes became Mao's relics, how Vietnamese spirit mediums channel Ho Chi Minh, and what kinds of imaginaries can flourish in post-socialist ruins like Moscow and Silicon Valley.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI225
Prereq: None

REES233 Introduction to Russian and Soviet Cinema

This course provides an introduction to the history and poetics of imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian cinema. From the avant-garde experimentation of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov to the masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Kira Muratova, the course will explore the development of film from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods as artistic medium and as national tradition. The discussion and comparative analyses of different forms and genres, including silent cinema, propaganda films, blockbusters, and auteur cinema, will be situated within the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RULE233, RUSS233, FILM333, WLIT255
Prereq: None

REES234 Introduction to Russian and Soviet Cinema (CLAC.50)

This course provides an introduction to the history and poetics of Soviet and Russian cinema--in Russian. From the avant-garde experimentation of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov to the masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Kira Muratova, the course will explore the development of Russian film as artistic medium and as national tradition. The discussion and comparative analyses of different forms and genres, including silent cinema, propaganda films, blockbusters, and auteur cinema, will be situated within the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. Students will learn the key works, names, events, and concepts of the Russian cinematic tradition. They will develop skills in analyzing and interpreting films and will acquire the basic critical terminology of film studies in Russian and English. They will also learn how film form and aesthetics are conditioned by technology, ideology, economics, theory, tradition, and culture. The overarching goal is to see how cinema in Russia and the Soviet Union has created and contested narratives of history and identity, how cinema has served the interests of the state, and how it has defied them. This class consists of lectures and focused discussion of films. It will be taught in Russian and is open to students who have successfully completed RUSS202, as well as to heritage and native speakers. Students can expect to practice speaking Russian and honing their writing skills. Credit: 0.5
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS234, CGST234, FILM234
Prereq: RUSS202

REES235 Queer Russia

Russia is accustomed to playing the role of the "evil empire." The current ongoing war in Ukraine has resurrected the Cold War-era narratives about Russia as a dark, aggressive, and ruthless military power. The notorious legislation of recent years--whose functions range from barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans to criminalizing the so-called "gay propaganda"--have further solidified Russia's reputation as a country with little regard for human rights. Yet generations of Russian poets, artists, and writers have transformed the country's systematic oppression and violence into spectacular forms of protest and self-expression. This course focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine poetry, fiction, art, memoirs, plays, films, performances, and discursive texts that showcase uniquely Russian conceptions of marriage, gender relations, gender expression, and sexual identity. Attention will be paid to the ways in which Russian and Western narratives of queerness align and diverge. In English. No knowledge of Russian is required or expected.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RULE235, RUSS235, FGSS234
Prereq: None

REES240F Reading Stories: Great Short Works from Gogol to Petrushevskaya (FYS)

This course is designed to help students improve their writing through the close reading and analysis of short stories and novellas by Russian masters of the form. Students will be asked to bring to each class their ideas on how to construct an argument that could be developed into a written interpretation of the work being discussed. These discussions, along with work on building logical arguments, recognizing propaganda and disinformation, and polishing grammar and style, will inform students' own writing (four 5-page papers). We will read works from the 19th century to the late 20th century that include Tolstoy's novellas of faith, adultery, and facing death; Gogol's surreal comedies and urbanistic fantasies; Chekhov's subtle psychological tales; Bunin's reflections from exile on a lost Russia; Bulgakov's sketches of life as a country doctor; and Petrushevskaya's modern stories of the tortured lives of women in the late Soviet period.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS240F, RULE240F, WLIT240F
Prereq: None

REES251 Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is widely recognized as one of the world's greatest novelists. His career begins at the end of Russian Romanticism, is interrupted by nine years of prison and exile in Siberia, and resumes at the beginning of the age of the great realist novel. Dostoevsky's major works grapple with the themes of sin and crime, the disintegration of the family, and the difficulty of believing in God in a world full of evil.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS251, RULE251, WLIT244
Prereq: None

REES252 Tolstoy

During the 19th century when Tolstoy wrote his novels and stories, literature was viewed in Russia as the intelligentsia's primary medium for debating its big questions (such as how to resolve the inequalities that had been institutionalized under serfdom, or how to choose between new and old values as Russia experienced modernization). Writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky willingly assumed the responsibility to address a broad range of political, historical, and philosophical-religious questions in their fiction, and they wrote novels with radical formulations as well as solutions to these questions. However, they also viewed literature, particularly the novel, as a medium with rich potential for innovative formal experimentation, and so they resisted the call for conventional ideological novels. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms.



For native speakers and learners who have studied Russian for at least four semesters, a half-credit course is available in which we will read excerpts from Tolstoy's works (CGST 330).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS252, COL262, RULE252, WLIT252
Prereq: None

REES254 Nobel Laureates: The Politics of Literature

The course examines key cultural and socio-historical moments in the development of twentieth-century Russian literature by focusing on the prose and poetry of authors awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature-Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), Joseph Brodsky (1987), and Svetlana Alexievich (2015). Additionally, the students will read Lev Tolstoy, who rejected being nominated for the prize, as well as Vladimir Nabokov and Anna Akhmatova, who arguably merited the award but never received it. On the broader level, the class will ponder literature's relevance for shaping public discourse on cultural policies, national identities, and international relations.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RULE254, RUSS254
Prereq: None

REES255 Prague, Vienna, Sarajevo: 20th-Century Novels from Central and Eastern Europe

This course is a survey of 20th-century prose fiction of Central and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on the Czech novel. The novels we will read make history come alive through the eyes of vividly individual characters. In Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is viewed through the lens of a single heartbroken family; in Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England, the Czech experience in World War II and postwar Stalinization is embodied in the figure of a diminutive hotel waiter; Volodymyr Rafeyenko's Mondegreen is an experimental narrative told through the eyes of a refugee from the Ukrainian Donbas region in Kyiv who struggles with language and identity; Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk's Flights provides a constellation of short narratives that attempt to capture the place of the body in the world of travel and migration; in Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk and Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno, the main characters find themselves in a foreign land when their home countries (Poland and Yugoslavia, respectively) are torn apart by war. All the works we will read exemplify the high level of narrative sophistication, in realist, absurdist, and experimental modes, that is a hallmark of Central and Eastern European literature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS255, RULE255, WLIT259
Prereq: None

REES256 The Soviet Century

This course begins and ends with two of the most important dates of the 20th century. On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik party launched a revolution against the government of the Russian Empire with the aim of overthrowing not just the state but capitalism, the economic and social system that defined modern civilization. Over the coming decades, the state they created (eventually named the USSR) embarked on an unprecedented project to transform human beings and remake the world. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 European and Asian countries.



The Soviet project raises fundamental questions about political systems, economics, and human nature--questions that are a long way from being answered. It also shaped modern history all over the world, including in the United States, which confronted the Soviet Union as its political and ideological archenemy during the Cold War. In charting the USSR's trajectory from pariah nation after World War I to global superpower following World War II, we will move beyond the cliched view of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. Instead, we will examine the ways in which socialist modernity offered an alternative to its capitalist twin.



In an effort to understand the contradictions of Soviet life leading up to and during the Cold War, the class will examine how the Soviets sought to rethink issues of class struggle, family structure, education, gender dynamics, race, religion, sexuality, and patriotism. We will consider the theoretical writings of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in addition to poetry and prose by Babel, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Platonov, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Berggolts, and Nabokov, among others. Particular attention will be paid to underground cultures that arose in response to the repression of free speech, ethnic discrimination, and the Gulag prison system. All readings are in the English translation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: RULE256, RUSS256, WLIT246
Prereq: None

REES260 Dostoevsky's BRAT'IA KARAMAZOVY

A seminar devoted to close reading of the original text of Dostoevsky's 1879-80 novel. All students will be required to read the entire text in English, and each week specific passages will be read in Russian. In class we will analyze and discuss the text in Russian. Students will give presentations about critical works related to the novel and to Dostoevsky's work in general. Dostoevsky's novel enters into a great dialogue with the political, historical, philosophical, and religious discourses that were prevalent in 19th-century Russia. Study of the novel entails learning the various languages of 19th-century Russian culture. Close reading of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in Russian will teach the genres and styles that Dostoevsky weaves together in his great novel. Class will be conducted in Russian.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS260
Prereq: None

REES267 Parody: Humor, Artistic Evolution, and Restoration of the Sacred

Parody is a form of artistic expression that has played a major role in literary history, largely through its power of critical revision. According to Russian formalist theorists of the early 20th century, parody is a driving force in literary evolution. Linda Hutcheon's formulation, that parody is "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity," provides perhaps the broadest and most fruitful point of departure. The course will consider various definitions of parody offered by Russian and Western theorists. After examining parody as pure humor (Woody Allen, MAD magazine, Hot Fuzz) and parody as a tool of literary evolution (Gogol and Dostoevsky), we will study the more complicated case of "restorative parody," as exemplified in the medieval practice of parodia sacra (sacred parody), discussed by theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Olga Freidenberg. We will look at the modern manifestation of parodia sacra in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, and of restorative parody in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. The course will also include discussion of legal issues raised by parody, in the case of 2 Live Crew / Roy Orbison (which led to a 1994 Supreme Court decision, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, in which Justice David Souter offered his own definition of parody). At the end of the semester, students will present their own research or creative projects related to parody.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS267, RULE267
Prereq: None

REES268 Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov--brilliant writer, outrageous literary gamesman, and cosmopolitan exile--is a towering figure of 20th-century literature. His most famous novel, "Lolita," propelled him to international stardom and changed the transnational literary landscape. Child of a turbulent century, Nabokov wrote exquisite and at times disturbing prose in Russian and English, balancing between imaginary worlds and harsh realities. This seminar offers a sustained exploration of Nabokov's major Russian and American writings as well as film adaptations of his "Despair" (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and "Lolita" (Stanley Kubrick). We will consider memory, exile, trauma, nostalgia, and identity as we read Nabokov, who saw existence as a "series of footnotes to a vast, obscure, unfinished masterpiece."
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: COL268
Prereq: None

REES276 Contemporary Russian Literature

The course offers a survey of contemporary Russian literature, with a focus on the post-Soviet period. We will discuss how Russian literature relates, aesthetically and anthropologically, to the dynamic historical period roughly starting in 1985: perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberal 1990s and the emerging market economy, ethnic conflicts, and the era of Putinism. We will read works written in different aesthetic modes: documentary genre (Svetlana Alexievich, Maria Stepanova), Russian postmodern prose (Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin), realist writers (German Sadulaev), as well as the most recent popular best-sellers and movies.



The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RULE276, WLIT266, RUSS276
Prereq: None

REES277 Gogol and His Legacy: Witches, Con Men, and Runaway Noses

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), hailed as one of Russia's greatest and most distinctive writers, created a phantasmagorical world of devils and witches coexisting with the gritty details of life in Ukraine, St. Petersburg, and the Russian provinces. Gogol's satirical observations delighted socially conscious contemporary critics, while his linguistic experimentation and subversion of the rules of logic inspired later modernist writers. Roughly half of the course is devoted to major writers of the twentieth century. We will consider Gogol's interest in the demonic; his complex identity as a bilingual writer claimed by both Ukraine and Russia as one of their greatest cultural figures; the influence of his formal and linguistic experimentation on later writers such as Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Bulgakov, with his vision of the Devil visiting Soviet Moscow; and Gogol's reception by modern Russian and Western writers and critics. The course is conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS277, RULE277, WLIT242
Prereq: None

REES279 Chekhov: Prose vs. Drama

This course explores the oeuvre of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the most influential modern dramatists¿the author of such classic plays as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov also wrote profound prose works, such as "Ward No. 6," "The Black Monk," "Rothschild¿s Violin," and "The Lady with a Lapdog."



As one of Chekhov¿s biographers put it, "Of all the Russian 'classics' he is, to non-Russians especially, the most approachable and the least alien, whether on the stage or the printed page. He lets his reader and spectator react as they wish, draw their own conclusions. He imposes no philosophy" (Donald Rayfield).



Poetic, dense, and elusive, Chekhov¿s writing continues to attract readers, spectators, and theater-makers of all kinds. Some of Chekhov's admirers believe that the quality of his fiction surpasses that of his most famous plays. This course approaches Chekhov by focusing on the tension between his prose and drama: what can a Chekhov short story accomplish that a Chekhov play cannot, and vice versa? After all, a concern with the purpose of human existence undergirds his short stories and plays alike. More specifically, studying Chekhov enables a fresh understanding of happiness and joy, of grief and sorrow in a relentlessly brutal world. An extraordinary storyteller capable of spotting dramatic conflict in the most mundane situations, Chekhov allows for rich discussions of the passage of time, conflict between generations, professional failure, the pressures of gender norms, and the costs of colonialism in late Russian Imperial society.



In addition to literary analysis, the course offers an opportunity to get acquainted with the basics of Chekhov's influence on contemporary performance. Expert guest lecturers will facilitate workshops on acting and directing Chekhov.



Film adaptations and recordings of stage performances will supplement readings. All readings and discussion are in English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS279, WLIT265, RULE279
Prereq: None

REES280 Russian Politics

The course begins with a brief review of the dynamics of the Soviet system and the reasons for its collapse in 1991. The traumatic transition of the 1990s raised profound questions about what conditions are necessary for the evolution of effective political and economic institutions. The chaos of the Yeltsin years was followed by a return to authoritarian rule under President Putin, although the long-run stability of the Putin system is also open to question. While the focus of the course is Russia, students will also study the transition process in the other 14 states that came out of the Soviet Union. Topics include political institutions, social movements, economic reforms, and foreign policy strategies.



The course will include a role-playing simulation of Kremlin decision making that will run over several weeks.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-GOVT
Identical With: GOVT274
Prereq: None

REES282 Modern Shamanism: Ecstasy and Ancestors in the New Age

The wise and mysterious native shaman has long held a particular fascination for Western scholars of religion, but does this figure even exist? What does it mean to be a practicing shaman today? Beginning with Eliade's definition of "archaic ecstasy," we examine the idea of the shaman, their role in the New Age movement, and the challenges faced by contemporary indigenous shamans, from negotiating international intellectual property rights law to Ayahuasca tourism and environmental activism. Course materials are supplemented by A/V materials from the instructor's fieldwork in Siberia.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI239
Prereq: None

REES286 Ukraine at War

This course will survey Ukraine's contentious history with its Russian neighbors and then track the origins and course of the current war. Each week we will have one meeting devoted to discussion of assigned readings and one meeting led by a Ukrainian lecturer speaking on Zoom. Topics to be covered include history and politics but also economics, social impacts, the plight of refugees, and cultural life.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: None
Identical With: GOVT286, CSPL286
Prereq: None

REES289 Indigenous Religions: Politics, Land, Healing

From wise old shamans to heroic pipeline protestors, the media is full of romantic representations of indigenous religion, but what do you really know beyond the stereotypes? If indigenous religion is just religion practiced by indigenous people, is it a category at all? Since the first days of colonialism the question of whether or not the "natives" have or are capable of having religion has had political consequences. This class introduces students to the historical and political contexts within which indigenous peoples practice their religions, and critically engages with popular stereotypes. Using ethnography, fiction, critical theory, and the instructor's own fieldwork materials, we will examine some of the criteria by which indigenous religious practices have been romanticized or judged lacking by outsiders: What does an oral tradition sound like? What does it mean to engage in place-based religion? What is a "noble savage," what are sacred sites, animate landscapes, and what are some of the ways indigenous peoples really do relate to the environment in radically different ways? What are some of the contradictions and complications of multiculturalism and the politics of recognition when it comes to indigenous populations? While this is not a survey course, students will be introduced to case studies of indigenous religious practices from North America, Australia, and Siberia.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI289
Prereq: None

REES290 Tolstoy Part One: War and Peace and Other Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. This course will deal with the first half of Tolstoy's career, beginning with his experiments in the narration of consciousness ("A History of Yesterday" and Childhood) and in the narration of the experience of war (Sevastopol Stories). The main part of the course will be devoted to his epic War and Peace, in which the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 serves as the vehicle for considering the nature of Russian nationhood, the place of the individual in large historical events, and the very essence of how history should be narrated. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: COL276, RULE290, RUSS290, WLIT263
Prereq: None

REES291 Tolstoy Part Two: Anna Karenina and Later Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. His influence in Russia went far beyond literature. By the end of his life, he was the leader of a moral movement known as Tolstoyanism, the major tenets of which were pacifism, vegetarianism, and a resistance to state power verging on anarchism. This course begins with Tolstoy's mid-career masterpiece Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy explores the problematic nature of the Russian family through the experiences of two main characters: an adulterous wife, for whom the novel is named, and an autobiographical stand-in, Konstantin Lyovin, who is a mouthpiece for many of Tolstoy's own concerns about the post-emancipation Russian economy and the pernicious influence of the West. We will also read Tolstoy's final major novel, Resurrection, which calls into question all the bases of modern society, with the prison system as the primary embodiment of societal evil. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: COL277, RULE291, RUSS291, WLIT264
Prereq: None

REES296 Soundscapes of Islam

From the melodious recitation of the Qur'an and Sufi-inspired sung poetry to popular soundtracks of religious revival and resistance, the world of Islam has generated myriad sonic expressions across its diverse historical and geocultural milieus. While recognized for its affective and transformative powers, music has also been the subject of a longstanding polemic in Islamic societies, its moral and ethical status being debated and contested. This course will survey the soundscapes and ideoscapes of Islam, exploring the manifold roles and meanings assigned to music among Muslim communities. It will examine a range of sound practices and related discourses to discover the ways in which locally distinct religious and social customs have shaped concepts of music and sonic articulations of Muslim identity. We will locate the varied and shifting attitudes toward music and musicians within the context of political censorship, colonialism, nationalism, and cosmopolitan modernity, and consider the impact of current conflicts and migratory processes on the local-global circulation of religious ideologies and sounds. Drawing from selected case studies of sacred and secular performance, we will explore the musical construction of gender, place, and architecture; the role of media in the formation of Muslim 'counterpublics'; and the mediation of aesthetic sensibilities through style. Topics covered will include: views on music within the Islamic tradition (the Qur'an and Sunna, shari'a law, theology, and Sufism); philosophies and cosmologies of music in Islam; music at the courts of Islamic rulers; religious chant and art singing in the Middle East; sound, healing, and exorcism in North Africa; ritual, devotional, and mystical practices in Central Asia; Islamic performing arts in Indonesia; Sufi world music and Muslim pop and hip-hop across Asia and Africa, and among immigrants and refugees in Europe and North America. Throughout the course, Islam will be encountered as a widely diverse spiritual and sociocultural system that has been a source and stimulus for creativity among Muslim peoples worldwide.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC296, COL294
Prereq: None

REES297 Music of Central Asia: From Throat-singing to Heavy Metal

The music of the Hu was chosen as the soundtrack to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order because it sounded otherworldly to Western audiences. In fact, the Hu draw on ancient musical traditions from Central Asia, one of the most culturally and musically diverse areas of the world. This course introduces students to a wide range of music practices, genres, and styles in historically nomadic and sedentary regions of Central Asia: throat-singing, sounds of shamanic and Sufi Islamic rituals, epic performance, narrative instrumental playing, oral poetry competitions, folk and art singing, Western-influenced classical and popular music genres, including Central Asian repertoires of opera and symphony, Azerbaijani jazz, Uzbek estrada, Kazakh Q-pop and crossover music, Mongolian heavy metal and hip hop. The roles and meanings of music are discussed in relation to wider aspects of culture and social life, the impact of Soviet culture policies, post-Soviet national revival, and globalization.



The course includes a performance component. Students learn to play a variety of Kazakh and Kyrgyz musical instruments, including plucked and bowed lutes, a plucked zither, clay ocarinas, jaw harps, and percussion instruments. Previous musical training is not necessary. The course draws on extensive audiovisual materials and is open to students of all levels.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC297, RUSS297, COL298
Prereq: None

REES299 Imagining Communities: National Religions and Political Rituals

From the Catholic-Protestant troubles in Northern Ireland, Christian nationalism in Serbia, Hindu-Buddhist conflict in Sri Lanka, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, religious nationalism often produces virulent and violent conflict. Yet the Virgin of Guadeloupe is a national symbol of Mexico, Catholicism was central to the Polish Solidarity movement, and America defines itself as "one nation under God." How are we to understand the relationship between religion and national identity, and how do political rituals, both religious and secular, help form communities? Popular media and political science analysis define religious nationalism as dangerous and secular nationalism as good. We will investigate this claim over the course of the semester by asking what the study of religion and ritual can bring to the topic. Are religious and secular political rituals really as different as they seem? We will read and discuss the classic social theories of Samuel Huntington, Benedict Anderson, Emile Durkheim, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, and Talal Asad, and these readings will be interspersed with case studies that illustrate how these theories help us understand the world. Case studies include the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the arrest and trial of the punk band Pussy Riot in Russia, and the Yasukuni shrine in Japan, where the souls of kamikaze pilots and World War II war criminals are enshrined. In addition, students will pick a case study of their own for a research project. This project will be conducted through multiple small assignments over the course of the semester that will be combined into a final research paper and class presentation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-RELI
Identical With: RELI299
Prereq: None

REES318 The Politics of Death: The Living, the Dead, and the State

This course will explore the intersections between the living, the dead, and the state, focusing on the ways that death and the dead body raise particular questions and problems for different kinds of political regimes. The course will examine the collisions between the state and the dead, both symbolic and material, by investigating spaces where the state and death intersect in revealing ways: cemeteries, cremation, monuments, rituals, and religious institutions and cultures. The course will also follow, borrowing anthropologist Katherine Verdery's term, "the political lives of dead bodies," the ways in which states mobilize dead bodies to reconfigure the political order.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: HIST318, ENVS318
Prereq: None

REES321 Moscow/Berlin: Dreamworld and Catastrophe

The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany ushered in an era of imagining and building an anti-capitalist world based on the ideals of universal equality, freedom, and comradeship. Between World War I and World War II, Soviet Moscow and Weimar Berlin developed into centers of the international leftist movement that was committed to the cause of global proletarian revolution. While the revolutionary cause proved to be unattainable and costly, the period's artistic and intellectual achievements, known as the avant-garde, offer an extraordinary archive of utopian experimentation across borders.



Focusing on Moscow and Berlin, this course maps the socialist modernist aesthetic in interwar Europe and provides a comparative review of the transnational circulation of leftist and reactionary ideas registered in a variety of -isms: dadaism, expressionism, futurism, suprematism, and constructivism, as well as the New Objectivity, Bauhaus, and the practice of factography. The alignment of art and ideology will be explored through literature, art, and film and will consider the entanglements of egalitarian aspirations with nationalist agendas and emancipatory ideals with patriarchal residues. The course will also review the cultural production of Russian exiles living in Weimar Berlin and their conception of an "off-modern" path. The course will conclude with a discussion of the revolutionary avant-garde's legacy in the East Berlin underground and post-Soviet Moscow.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS321, GRST221, RULE321, WLIT341
Prereq: None

REES330 Reading Tolstoy in Russian (CLAC .50)

In this half-credit course, students will read excerpts from works by Lev Tolstoy in Russian. Class will be devoted both to translating the Russian texts and to discussing them in Russian. Non-native speakers should have studied Russian for at least four semesters.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS330, CGST330
Prereq: None

REES340 Reading Theories

In this survey of theories that have shaped the reading of literature and the analysis of culture, emphasis is on key concepts--language, identity, subjectivity, gender, power, and knowledge--and on key figures and schools such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure, Barthes, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Jameson, Berlant, Moten, postmodernism, and U.S. feminism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL295, COL339, CLST393, CEAS340, RL&L290, GRST231, RUSS340, RULE340
Prereq: None

REES344 "If there is no God, then everything is permitted?" Moral Life in a Secular World

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov famously poses the question of what would happen to mankind "without God and immortal life," asking whether this means that "all things are permitted." Made famous by Dostoevsky, the question of whether we can be moral without God has always haunted secularism and has consistently been the most vocal criticism of unbelief. From papal condemnations of secularism and "godless Soviets," to the contemporary consensus that belief in God is evidence of moral goodness and its absence a sign of a broken ethical barometer, the assumption has been that transcendental authority is all that stands between us and moral abyss. When the atrocities committed by "totalitarian" regimes are cited as evidence of this, it is only the most radical articulation of a broader narrative of secular modernity.



One of modernity's master narratives is that people go from being under the care of the church to being under the care of the state, and our focus will be on historical cases where the question of secular values was explicitly engaged by the state. We will examine individual and collective articulations of morality in three prominent models of secularism: American civil religion, French laïcité, and Communist official atheism. What constitutes the moral foundation of a world without God? Can religion's moral and spiritual function be performed by a different kind of belief system?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST395, RELI393
Prereq: None

REES344Z "If there is no God, then everything is permitted?" Moral Life in a Secular World

Please note: Students should expect some readings and assignments to be due during winter break, prior to beginning Winter Session. Please visit the Winter Session website for the full syllabus -- http://www.wesleyan.edu/wintersession.



In Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri Karamazov famously poses the question of what would happen to mankind "without God and immortal life," asking whether this means that "all things are permitted." Made famous by Dostoevsky, the question of whether we can be moral without God has always haunted secularism and has consistently been the most vocal criticism of unbelief. From papal condemnations of secularism and "godless Soviets," to the contemporary consensus that belief in God is evidence of moral goodness and its absence a sign of a broken ethical barometer, the assumption has been that transcendental authority is all that stands between us and moral abyss. When the atrocities committed by "totalitarian" regimes are cited as evidence of this, it is only the most radical articulation of a broader narrative of secular modernity.

One of modernity's master narratives is that people go from being under the care of the church to being under the care of the state, and our focus will be on historical cases where the question of secular values was explicitly engaged by the state. We will examine individual and collective articulations of morality in three prominent models of secularism: American civil religion, French laïcité, and Communist official atheism. What constitutes the moral foundation of a world without God? Can religion's moral and spiritual function be performed by a different kind of belief system?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST395Z, RELI393Z
Prereq: None

REES350 Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (CLAC .50)

Taught in Russian, this course is dedicated to the reading of 20th-century Russian poetry in the original (Blok, Mayakovsky, Mandesltam, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Prigov, etc.). The course is appropriate for native speakers, heritage speakers, advanced and intermediate learners (with the minimum of four semesters of Russian).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS350, CGST350
Prereq: RUSS202

REES352 The Communist Experience in the Soviet Union (CLAC.50)

Like the parent course, HIST353: The Communist Experience in the 20th Century, this CLAC course will engage with the problem of experience through a series of themes: subjectivity; engaging in the political process of building socialism; aesthetics; travel and tourism; East and West; race and ethnicity; production and consumption; time and space; political engagement and disengagement; science and technology; and emotions. We will work with sources from oral histories, diaries, film, television, and the press. The final project would involve a close reading and paper on a theme covered in class using both primary and preapproved secondary sources in Russian. The student language background appropriate for this class is (preferably advanced) intermediate to native.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST352, CGST352
Prereq: None

REES353 The Communist Experience in the 20th Century

Two decades have passed since the collapse of Communism, its empire, and its utopian vision of the kingdom of heaven on Earth. Indeed, the Communist collapse was heralded as not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history itself. Yet how do we understand the nature of the communist way of life, the causes of its decline, and the meaning of its demise? This course will trace the development of Communism's answer to capitalist modernity from the 1917 Revolution through the Soviet collapse. It will seek to shed light on the birth, life, and death of Communist modernity through history, literature, and art, by exploring the world socialism created as an ideological model and a way of life. The emphasis of the course will be on the lived experience of Communism, primarily within the Soviet Union, but also beyond it (in Eastern Europe and Asia). In the global conflict between capitalism and Communism, how did people understand the competing demands of ideology and reality, individual and society, private and public, production and consumption, labor and leisure? How did the state manage the contradictions that arose when lofty ideologies encountered everyday life, and how did citizens make sense of these ideological transformations? What killed Communism: bombs and diplomacy, or refrigerators and Finnish shoes?
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST353
Prereq: None

REES353Z The Communist Experience in the Twentieth Century

More than thirty years have passed since the collapse of Communism, its empire, and its utopian vision of the kingdom of heaven on Earth. Indeed, the Communist collapse was heralded as not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history itself. Yet how do we understand the nature of the Communist way of life, the causes of its decline, and the meaning of its demise? This course will trace the development of Communism's answer to capitalist modernity from the 1917 revolution through the Soviet collapse. It will seek to shed light on the birth, life, and death of Communist modernity through history, literature, and art, by exploring the world socialism created as an ideological model and a way of life. The emphasis of the course will be on the lived experience of Communism, primarily within the Soviet Union but also beyond it (in Eastern Europe and Asia). In the global conflict between Capitalism and Communism, how did people understand the competing demands of ideology and reality, individual and society, private and public, production and consumption, labor and leisure? How did the state manage the contradictions that arose when lofty ideologies encountered everyday life, and how did citizens make sense of these ideological transformations? What killed Communism: bombs and diplomacy, or refrigerators and Finnish shoes? This course is an intensive reading, research, and writing seminar.



- This course is held entirely online and is a hybrid synchronous and asynchronous format.

- You should be prepared to spend at least 4-6 hours/day on class work.

- There is a class every day: on Mondays and Thursdays we will meet synchronously on Zoom at our regular class time (3:30-5:10 pm); on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the format will be asynchronous (meaning you can engage with the day's materials at your own pace within a 24-hour window).

- You are expected to participate in each class having read the assigned material and reflected on them in your forum comments. Each day's online discussion will cover the topic and materials of the day.

- Each day you are expected to post at least one original comment of your own, and to respond to at least one comment by a classmate.

- The questions will be posted by 12 pm the day of the class, and the forum will be open for 24 hours, until 12 pm the following day.

- Be prepared to engage with the sources critically--to raise important issues, ask for clarification, and/or propose alternative interpretations, and to bring your own questions into the discussion. When possible, point to specific examples in the text and reference sources/page numbers to make the discussion easier to navigate for the class.

- Your active engagement in the seminar--both on the forum and in the synchronous sessions--is absolutely essential.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST353Z
Prereq: None

REES377 Perspectives in Arts as Culture: Ukrainian Arts and Language as Resistance

Throughout history, arts and language have been central to Ukrainian resilience. This course will introduce students to basic elements of the Ukrainian language as well as the rich tradition of Ukrainian arts--dance, theater, poetry, literature, visual arts and crafts--and the way they have survived and thrived despite 400 years of censorship and persecution. Each week, one class will focus on the basics of the Ukrainian language, its history as a vital element of the Ukrainian culture, as well as current national language policy and practice. The second class will explore the ways that arts in Ukraine foster psychosocial, physical, and political resilience in the face of crisis. Students will engage with traditional arts and crafts, learn about leading experimental artists (1700s-present) and their role in major art movements in history, hear from an array of guest artists from Ukraine, and complete a final creative project that explores the current political moment and conflict in Ukraine.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC377, CSPL367, ENVS377
Prereq: None

REES378 Repertory and Performance: Transforming the World/Transforming Dance

This unique interdisciplinary repertory course integrates multiple student interests--collaborating, engaging, performing, writing, moving, thinking, discussing, and making. Students will embody human agency from diverse perspectives as they transform worlds, past, present, and future. Students will bring into the course their own lived life experiences as they learn how to utilize somatic (mind/body) practices and creative exploration in the studio.



Together we will build a vital community of artists/activists as we explore our relationship to our selves, each other, and our environments--natural, social, historical, and political. How do we navigate chaos and violence as well as the joy and possibility that surrounds us, while maintaining our self, our action and power. We will ground our research in relation to specific places including Ukraine (as a liminal geographic, social, and political place), Wesleyan campus (the place we are living), and places that hold significance to each student.



The course will culminate in the world premiere of a new work that we'll create together to be performed for the public at the end of the semester.



This course is open to movers of all backgrounds who are interested in the intersections of embodiment, performance, movement, and social action.



No dance experience is required. This course does not require permission of instructor (POI), but if you are interested in the course I would appreciate you contacting me by email to let me know so I can best prepare the syllabus for our group. Thank you!
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-DANC
Identical With: DANC378, ENVS378, CSPL379, THEA378
Prereq: None

REES401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

REES402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

REES407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

REES408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

REES409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

REES410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

REES411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

REES412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

REES465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RULE205 Murder and Adultery: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the 19th-Century Russian Novel

The 19th-century novel is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Russian literature. This course will trace its development from Pushkin's elegant, witty novel in verse, EUGENE ONEGIN, through the grotesque comedy of Gogol, to the realist masterpieces of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with their complex depiction of human psychology and the philosophical struggles of late 19th-century society. We will consider the historical background in which the novels were produced and the tools developed by Russian critical theory, especially the Russian formalists and Mikhail Bakhtin, for understanding 19th-century Russian prose.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS205, REES205, WLIT241
Prereq: None

RULE208F Otherness & Belonging (FYS)

One of the many haunting utterances of Fyodor Dostoevsky's most famous antihero, the Underground Man, is "I am alone, I thought, and they are everyone." Like him, the other protagonists of this course are outcasts, dissidents, and strangers - jaded office clerks and repressed misanthropes, queer activists and "enemies of the state" - who refuse to conform to societal norms, disrupt conventions by saying the unsayable, and write and make art from the margins, the realm of undesirables. Focusing mainly on Russia and Eastern Europe, we will analyze representations of otherness and belonging in fiction, non-fiction, and film. We will explore narratives of undesirability through the thematic prisms of exile and immigration; gender and sexuality; mental illness; prison writing; ethnic difference; religion; and unrequited love. The concept of undesirability will also be our point of entry for constructing arguments about community, privilege, and a society without outsiders.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES208F, RUSS208F, WLIT245F
Prereq: None

RULE220 Speak, Memory: The Russian Memoir

Memoirs offer a chance for individuals to make sense of their relationship to larger historical forces and allow writers of fiction and poetry to reflect on the tensions between biography and the creative process. We will read memoirs of prison and of Stalinist terror by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam; visions of childhood by Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and poets Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva; and works of autobiography by Viktor Shklovsky and Sergey Gandlevsky that create their own worlds of literary experimentation. The course will also consider the theoretical problems of autobiographical writing. Students will write a memoir of childhood (3-5 pages) to better understand the technical problems faced by Tolstoy in writing about his childhood. Students will also write a piece of memoiristic prose, or a parody or imitation of one of the writers in the course (minimum 10 pages), as one of their three papers. We will devote one class session to a writing workshop session on the creative project.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS220, REES220, WLIT243
Prereq: None

RULE222 Russian and American Poetic Encounters

The fascination of Russian poets with American authors, and the curiosity of Anglophone poets about the culture of Russia and the USSR, are trends that accompany the turbulent twentieth century, when the political relationships between Russia and the USA were largely inimical. But it was also a period when poetry mattered. In this course, we will focus on some of the most significant poets of the twentieth century.



We will study six Russian poets (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Olga Sedakova, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko), and six American poets (William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian), and also one Caribbean poet (Derek Walcott).



We will learn how to analyze lyric poetry, and how to study it comparatively. We will explore the poets' dialogues with each other across cultures. For example, we will learn how Mayakovsky's "ladder" might have influenced Williams' vers libre, or how Joseph Brodsky learned T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in poetry even though Eliot was banned in the USSR. We will also explore where poetry and politics meet. For example, we will discuss why Langston Hughes found his visit to the USSR inspirational as an African-American poet, and we will see whether the myth that Robert Frost's visit to the USSR contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis is true.



The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES222, RUSS222, ENGL238, WLIT267
Prereq: None

RULE223 After Communism: Animals, Avatars, Hybrids

During the last two decades of the 20th century, a wide array of Soviet and post-Soviet writers either replaced or merged the traditional human protagonist with another: the animal. Whether featuring a penguin avatar or disillusioned insects; a human centipede or a pack of werewolves, these literary works directly and indirectly shed light on the historical context in which they were written: the last decade before and the one immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Keeping in mind this historical and social context, we will analyze representations of hybridity, violence, sexuality, and (imagined) communities--all through texts that challenge us to consider what the animal represents and how it affects our expectations of narrative. The secondary readings will situate the animal in a broader philosophical and theoretical framework, and special attention will be paid to postmodernism as a movement in literature and art. Conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: RUSS223, REES223, WLIT256
Prereq: None

RULE224 Performing Russian Culture: From Peter the Great to the Russian Revolution

This course offers a survey of Russian culture from 1700-1917 through the perspective of performance studies. Starting with the reign of Peter the Great and ending on the eve of the revolution, we read some of the seminal works of the Russian literary canon, including plays, poems, short stories, and novels. We also consider examples from visual and material culture: paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects. Alongside these primary sources, we discuss theoretical pieces from the field of performance studies in order to expose and reflect on the social and political mechanisms embedded in the shaping of various forms of "Russianness." The course will explore ever-relevant questions of belonging, display of power, and ideology, and ask how, why, and by whom cultural identities are contrived and performed. The course is conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: RUSS224, REES224, WLIT257
Prereq: None

RULE233 Introduction to Russian and Soviet Cinema

This course provides an introduction to the history and poetics of imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian cinema. From the avant-garde experimentation of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov to the masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Kira Muratova, the course will explore the development of film from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods as artistic medium and as national tradition. The discussion and comparative analyses of different forms and genres, including silent cinema, propaganda films, blockbusters, and auteur cinema, will be situated within the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES233, RUSS233, FILM333, WLIT255
Prereq: None

RULE235 Queer Russia

Russia is accustomed to playing the role of the "evil empire." The current ongoing war in Ukraine has resurrected the Cold War-era narratives about Russia as a dark, aggressive, and ruthless military power. The notorious legislation of recent years--whose functions range from barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans to criminalizing the so-called "gay propaganda"--have further solidified Russia's reputation as a country with little regard for human rights. Yet generations of Russian poets, artists, and writers have transformed the country's systematic oppression and violence into spectacular forms of protest and self-expression. This course focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine poetry, fiction, art, memoirs, plays, films, performances, and discursive texts that showcase uniquely Russian conceptions of marriage, gender relations, gender expression, and sexual identity. Attention will be paid to the ways in which Russian and Western narratives of queerness align and diverge. In English. No knowledge of Russian is required or expected.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES235, RUSS235, FGSS234
Prereq: None

RULE240F Reading Stories: Great Short Works from Gogol to Petrushevskaya (FYS)

This course is designed to help students improve their writing through the close reading and analysis of short stories and novellas by Russian masters of the form. Students will be asked to bring to each class their ideas on how to construct an argument that could be developed into a written interpretation of the work being discussed. These discussions, along with work on building logical arguments, recognizing propaganda and disinformation, and polishing grammar and style, will inform students' own writing (four 5-page papers). We will read works from the 19th century to the late 20th century that include Tolstoy's novellas of faith, adultery, and facing death; Gogol's surreal comedies and urbanistic fantasies; Chekhov's subtle psychological tales; Bunin's reflections from exile on a lost Russia; Bulgakov's sketches of life as a country doctor; and Petrushevskaya's modern stories of the tortured lives of women in the late Soviet period.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS240F, REES240F, WLIT240F
Prereq: None

RULE251 Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is widely recognized as one of the world's greatest novelists. His career begins at the end of Russian Romanticism, is interrupted by nine years of prison and exile in Siberia, and resumes at the beginning of the age of the great realist novel. Dostoevsky's major works grapple with the themes of sin and crime, the disintegration of the family, and the difficulty of believing in God in a world full of evil.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS251, REES251, WLIT244
Prereq: None

RULE252 Tolstoy

During the 19th century when Tolstoy wrote his novels and stories, literature was viewed in Russia as the intelligentsia's primary medium for debating its big questions (such as how to resolve the inequalities that had been institutionalized under serfdom, or how to choose between new and old values as Russia experienced modernization). Writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky willingly assumed the responsibility to address a broad range of political, historical, and philosophical-religious questions in their fiction, and they wrote novels with radical formulations as well as solutions to these questions. However, they also viewed literature, particularly the novel, as a medium with rich potential for innovative formal experimentation, and so they resisted the call for conventional ideological novels. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms.



For native speakers and learners who have studied Russian for at least four semesters, a half-credit course is available in which we will read excerpts from Tolstoy's works (CGST 330).
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS252, REES252, COL262, WLIT252
Prereq: None

RULE254 Nobel Laureates: The Politics of Literature

The course examines key cultural and socio-historical moments in the development of twentieth-century Russian literature by focusing on the prose and poetry of authors awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature-Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), Joseph Brodsky (1987), and Svetlana Alexievich (2015). Additionally, the students will read Lev Tolstoy, who rejected being nominated for the prize, as well as Vladimir Nabokov and Anna Akhmatova, who arguably merited the award but never received it. On the broader level, the class will ponder literature's relevance for shaping public discourse on cultural policies, national identities, and international relations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES254, RUSS254
Prereq: None

RULE255 Prague, Vienna, Sarajevo: 20th-Century Novels from Central and Eastern Europe

This course is a survey of 20th-century prose fiction of Central and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on the Czech novel. The novels we will read make history come alive through the eyes of vividly individual characters. In Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is viewed through the lens of a single heartbroken family; in Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England, the Czech experience in World War II and postwar Stalinization is embodied in the figure of a diminutive hotel waiter; Volodymyr Rafeyenko's Mondegreen is an experimental narrative told through the eyes of a refugee from the Ukrainian Donbas region in Kyiv who struggles with language and identity; Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk's Flights provides a constellation of short narratives that attempt to capture the place of the body in the world of travel and migration; in Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk and Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno, the main characters find themselves in a foreign land when their home countries (Poland and Yugoslavia, respectively) are torn apart by war. All the works we will read exemplify the high level of narrative sophistication, in realist, absurdist, and experimental modes, that is a hallmark of Central and Eastern European literature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS255, REES255, WLIT259
Prereq: None

RULE256 The Soviet Century

This course begins and ends with two of the most important dates of the 20th century. On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik party launched a revolution against the government of the Russian Empire with the aim of overthrowing not just the state but capitalism, the economic and social system that defined modern civilization. Over the coming decades, the state they created (eventually named the USSR) embarked on an unprecedented project to transform human beings and remake the world. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 European and Asian countries.



The Soviet project raises fundamental questions about political systems, economics, and human nature--questions that are a long way from being answered. It also shaped modern history all over the world, including in the United States, which confronted the Soviet Union as its political and ideological archenemy during the Cold War. In charting the USSR's trajectory from pariah nation after World War I to global superpower following World War II, we will move beyond the cliched view of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. Instead, we will examine the ways in which socialist modernity offered an alternative to its capitalist twin.



In an effort to understand the contradictions of Soviet life leading up to and during the Cold War, the class will examine how the Soviets sought to rethink issues of class struggle, family structure, education, gender dynamics, race, religion, sexuality, and patriotism. We will consider the theoretical writings of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in addition to poetry and prose by Babel, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Platonov, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Berggolts, and Nabokov, among others. Particular attention will be paid to underground cultures that arose in response to the repression of free speech, ethnic discrimination, and the Gulag prison system. All readings are in the English translation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: REES256, RUSS256, WLIT246
Prereq: None

RULE267 Parody: Humor, Artistic Evolution, and Restoration of the Sacred

Parody is a form of artistic expression that has played a major role in literary history, largely through its power of critical revision. According to Russian formalist theorists of the early 20th century, parody is a driving force in literary evolution. Linda Hutcheon's formulation, that parody is "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity," provides perhaps the broadest and most fruitful point of departure. The course will consider various definitions of parody offered by Russian and Western theorists. After examining parody as pure humor (Woody Allen, MAD magazine, Hot Fuzz) and parody as a tool of literary evolution (Gogol and Dostoevsky), we will study the more complicated case of "restorative parody," as exemplified in the medieval practice of parodia sacra (sacred parody), discussed by theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Olga Freidenberg. We will look at the modern manifestation of parodia sacra in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, and of restorative parody in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. The course will also include discussion of legal issues raised by parody, in the case of 2 Live Crew / Roy Orbison (which led to a 1994 Supreme Court decision, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, in which Justice David Souter offered his own definition of parody). At the end of the semester, students will present their own research or creative projects related to parody.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS267, REES267
Prereq: None

RULE276 Contemporary Russian Literature

The course offers a survey of contemporary Russian literature, with a focus on the post-Soviet period. We will discuss how Russian literature relates, aesthetically and anthropologically, to the dynamic historical period roughly starting in 1985: perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberal 1990s and the emerging market economy, ethnic conflicts, and the era of Putinism. We will read works written in different aesthetic modes: documentary genre (Svetlana Alexievich, Maria Stepanova), Russian postmodern prose (Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin), realist writers (German Sadulaev), as well as the most recent popular best-sellers and movies.



The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES276, WLIT266, RUSS276
Prereq: None

RULE277 Gogol and His Legacy: Witches, Con Men, and Runaway Noses

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), hailed as one of Russia's greatest and most distinctive writers, created a phantasmagorical world of devils and witches coexisting with the gritty details of life in Ukraine, St. Petersburg, and the Russian provinces. Gogol's satirical observations delighted socially conscious contemporary critics, while his linguistic experimentation and subversion of the rules of logic inspired later modernist writers. Roughly half of the course is devoted to major writers of the twentieth century. We will consider Gogol's interest in the demonic; his complex identity as a bilingual writer claimed by both Ukraine and Russia as one of their greatest cultural figures; the influence of his formal and linguistic experimentation on later writers such as Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Bulgakov, with his vision of the Devil visiting Soviet Moscow; and Gogol's reception by modern Russian and Western writers and critics. The course is conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: RUSS277, REES277, WLIT242
Prereq: None

RULE279 Chekhov: Prose vs. Drama

This course explores the oeuvre of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the most influential modern dramatists¿the author of such classic plays as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov also wrote profound prose works, such as "Ward No. 6," "The Black Monk," "Rothschild¿s Violin," and "The Lady with a Lapdog."



As one of Chekhov¿s biographers put it, "Of all the Russian 'classics' he is, to non-Russians especially, the most approachable and the least alien, whether on the stage or the printed page. He lets his reader and spectator react as they wish, draw their own conclusions. He imposes no philosophy" (Donald Rayfield).



Poetic, dense, and elusive, Chekhov¿s writing continues to attract readers, spectators, and theater-makers of all kinds. Some of Chekhov's admirers believe that the quality of his fiction surpasses that of his most famous plays. This course approaches Chekhov by focusing on the tension between his prose and drama: what can a Chekhov short story accomplish that a Chekhov play cannot, and vice versa? After all, a concern with the purpose of human existence undergirds his short stories and plays alike. More specifically, studying Chekhov enables a fresh understanding of happiness and joy, of grief and sorrow in a relentlessly brutal world. An extraordinary storyteller capable of spotting dramatic conflict in the most mundane situations, Chekhov allows for rich discussions of the passage of time, conflict between generations, professional failure, the pressures of gender norms, and the costs of colonialism in late Russian Imperial society.



In addition to literary analysis, the course offers an opportunity to get acquainted with the basics of Chekhov's influence on contemporary performance. Expert guest lecturers will facilitate workshops on acting and directing Chekhov.



Film adaptations and recordings of stage performances will supplement readings. All readings and discussion are in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES279, RUSS279, WLIT265
Prereq: None

RULE290 Tolstoy Part One: War and Peace and Other Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. This course will deal with the first half of Tolstoy's career, beginning with his experiments in the narration of consciousness ("A History of Yesterday" and Childhood) and in the narration of the experience of war (Sevastopol Stories). The main part of the course will be devoted to his epic War and Peace, in which the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 serves as the vehicle for considering the nature of Russian nationhood, the place of the individual in large historical events, and the very essence of how history should be narrated. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES290, COL276, RUSS290, WLIT263
Prereq: None

RULE291 Tolstoy Part Two: Anna Karenina and Later Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. His influence in Russia went far beyond literature. By the end of his life, he was the leader of a moral movement known as Tolstoyanism, the major tenets of which were pacifism, vegetarianism, and a resistance to state power verging on anarchism. This course begins with Tolstoy's mid-career masterpiece Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy explores the problematic nature of the Russian family through the experiences of two main characters: an adulterous wife, for whom the novel is named, and an autobiographical stand-in, Konstantin Lyovin, who is a mouthpiece for many of Tolstoy's own concerns about the post-emancipation Russian economy and the pernicious influence of the West. We will also read Tolstoy's final major novel, Resurrection, which calls into question all the bases of modern society, with the prison system as the primary embodiment of societal evil. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES291, COL277, RUSS291, WLIT264
Prereq: None

RULE321 Moscow/Berlin: Dreamworld and Catastrophe

The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany ushered in an era of imagining and building an anti-capitalist world based on the ideals of universal equality, freedom, and comradeship. Between World War I and World War II, Soviet Moscow and Weimar Berlin developed into centers of the international leftist movement that was committed to the cause of global proletarian revolution. While the revolutionary cause proved to be unattainable and costly, the period's artistic and intellectual achievements, known as the avant-garde, offer an extraordinary archive of utopian experimentation across borders.



Focusing on Moscow and Berlin, this course maps the socialist modernist aesthetic in interwar Europe and provides a comparative review of the transnational circulation of leftist and reactionary ideas registered in a variety of -isms: dadaism, expressionism, futurism, suprematism, and constructivism, as well as the New Objectivity, Bauhaus, and the practice of factography. The alignment of art and ideology will be explored through literature, art, and film and will consider the entanglements of egalitarian aspirations with nationalist agendas and emancipatory ideals with patriarchal residues. The course will also review the cultural production of Russian exiles living in Weimar Berlin and their conception of an "off-modern" path. The course will conclude with a discussion of the revolutionary avant-garde's legacy in the East Berlin underground and post-Soviet Moscow.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES321, RUSS321, GRST221, WLIT341
Prereq: None

RULE340 Reading Theories

In this survey of theories that have shaped the reading of literature and the analysis of culture, emphasis is on key concepts--language, identity, subjectivity, gender, power, and knowledge--and on key figures and schools such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure, Barthes, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Jameson, Berlant, Moten, postmodernism, and U.S. feminism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL295, COL339, CLST393, CEAS340, RL&L290, GRST231, RUSS340, REES340
Prereq: None

RULE401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RULE402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS101 Elementary Russian I

This beginning course in Russian teaches basic grammar while providing extensive practice in speaking and listening to contemporary Russian. Because of the intensive workload, the student earns 1.5 credits for this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Prereq: None

RUSS102 Elementary Russian II

The course continues to develop basic skills in speaking, writing, and listening to contemporary Russian, as well as the knowledge of basic grammar. Because of the intensive workload, the student earns 1.5 credits for this course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Prereq: RUSS101

RUSS201 Intermediate Russian I

This course presents a continued study of Russian grammar with an emphasis on a complete analysis of the verb system. Exercises in class develop fluency in speaking and understanding spoken Russian while teaching the rules of Russian grammar.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Prereq: (RUSS101 AND RUSS102)

RUSS202 Intermediate Russian II

This course presents a continued study of Russian grammar with an emphasis on a complete analysis of the verb system. Exercises in class develop fluency in speaking and understanding spoken Russian while teaching the rules of Russian grammar.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Prereq: RUSS101 AND RUSS102 AND RUSS201

RUSS205 Murder and Adultery: Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the 19th-Century Russian Novel

The 19th-century novel is widely regarded as the supreme achievement of Russian literature. This course will trace its development from Pushkin's elegant, witty novel in verse, EUGENE ONEGIN, through the grotesque comedy of Gogol, to the realist masterpieces of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with their complex depiction of human psychology and the philosophical struggles of late 19th-century society. We will consider the historical background in which the novels were produced and the tools developed by Russian critical theory, especially the Russian formalists and Mikhail Bakhtin, for understanding 19th-century Russian prose.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES205, RULE205, WLIT241
Prereq: None

RUSS208F Otherness & Belonging (FYS)

One of the many haunting utterances of Fyodor Dostoevsky's most famous antihero, the Underground Man, is "I am alone, I thought, and they are everyone." Like him, the other protagonists of this course are outcasts, dissidents, and strangers - jaded office clerks and repressed misanthropes, queer activists and "enemies of the state" - who refuse to conform to societal norms, disrupt conventions by saying the unsayable, and write and make art from the margins, the realm of undesirables. Focusing mainly on Russia and Eastern Europe, we will analyze representations of otherness and belonging in fiction, non-fiction, and film. We will explore narratives of undesirability through the thematic prisms of exile and immigration; gender and sexuality; mental illness; prison writing; ethnic difference; religion; and unrequited love. The concept of undesirability will also be our point of entry for constructing arguments about community, privilege, and a society without outsiders.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES208F, RULE208F, WLIT245F
Prereq: None

RUSS220 Speak, Memory: The Russian Memoir

Memoirs offer a chance for individuals to make sense of their relationship to larger historical forces and allow writers of fiction and poetry to reflect on the tensions between biography and the creative process. We will read memoirs of prison and of Stalinist terror by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Nadezhda Mandelstam; visions of childhood by Lev Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, and poets Osip Mandelstam and Marina Tsvetaeva; and works of autobiography by Viktor Shklovsky and Sergey Gandlevsky that create their own worlds of literary experimentation. The course will also consider the theoretical problems of autobiographical writing. Students will write a memoir of childhood (3-5 pages) to better understand the technical problems faced by Tolstoy in writing about his childhood. Students will also write a piece of memoiristic prose, or a parody or imitation of one of the writers in the course (minimum 10 pages), as one of their three papers. We will devote one class session to a writing workshop session on the creative project.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES220, RULE220, WLIT243
Prereq: None

RUSS221 Queering Russian Music

How have the sexuality of a Russian composer Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky and international success of a popular music duo t.A.T.u. shaped the understanding of gender, sexuality, and queerness in the Russian context? This entry-level course introduces a variety of theoretical and journalistic approaches and presents a historical overview of Russian music centered around queerness, gender, sexuality, and power. Using methodologies of queer studies and queer theory, we will examine a variety of musical genres and musicians ranging from Imperial Russia to the present-day Russian popular and film music. The topics will focus on women composers, queer genres, queer sexual and musical identity.



Selected personalities examined in the course:

Catherine II (the Great), Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sofia Gubaidulina, Galina Ustvolskaya, Alla Pugacheva, Zemfira, t.A.T.u, Pussy Riot, AIGEL, Little Big, Manizha, Oxxxymiron, ICEPEAK
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC121, REES221
Prereq: None

RUSS222 Russian and American Poetic Encounters

The fascination of Russian poets with American authors, and the curiosity of Anglophone poets about the culture of Russia and the USSR, are trends that accompany the turbulent twentieth century, when the political relationships between Russia and the USA were largely inimical. But it was also a period when poetry mattered. In this course, we will focus on some of the most significant poets of the twentieth century.



We will study six Russian poets (Vladimir Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Olga Sedakova, and Arkadii Dragomoshchenko), and six American poets (William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian), and also one Caribbean poet (Derek Walcott).



We will learn how to analyze lyric poetry, and how to study it comparatively. We will explore the poets' dialogues with each other across cultures. For example, we will learn how Mayakovsky's "ladder" might have influenced Williams' vers libre, or how Joseph Brodsky learned T. S. Eliot's theory of impersonality in poetry even though Eliot was banned in the USSR. We will also explore where poetry and politics meet. For example, we will discuss why Langston Hughes found his visit to the USSR inspirational as an African-American poet, and we will see whether the myth that Robert Frost's visit to the USSR contributed to the Cuban Missile Crisis is true.



The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES222, RULE222, ENGL238, WLIT267
Prereq: None

RUSS223 After Communism: Animals, Avatars, Hybrids

During the last two decades of the 20th century, a wide array of Soviet and post-Soviet writers either replaced or merged the traditional human protagonist with another: the animal. Whether featuring a penguin avatar or disillusioned insects; a human centipede or a pack of werewolves, these literary works directly and indirectly shed light on the historical context in which they were written: the last decade before and the one immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Keeping in mind this historical and social context, we will analyze representations of hybridity, violence, sexuality, and (imagined) communities--all through texts that challenge us to consider what the animal represents and how it affects our expectations of narrative. The secondary readings will situate the animal in a broader philosophical and theoretical framework, and special attention will be paid to postmodernism as a movement in literature and art. Conducted in English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: REES223, RULE223, WLIT256
Prereq: None

RUSS224 Performing Russian Culture: From Peter the Great to the Russian Revolution

This course offers a survey of Russian culture from 1700-1917 through the perspective of performance studies. Starting with the reign of Peter the Great and ending on the eve of the revolution, we read some of the seminal works of the Russian literary canon, including plays, poems, short stories, and novels. We also consider examples from visual and material culture: paintings, sculptures, and everyday objects. Alongside these primary sources, we discuss theoretical pieces from the field of performance studies in order to expose and reflect on the social and political mechanisms embedded in the shaping of various forms of "Russianness." The course will explore ever-relevant questions of belonging, display of power, and ideology, and ask how, why, and by whom cultural identities are contrived and performed. The course is conducted in English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: REES224, WLIT257, RULE224
Prereq: None

RUSS226 Documentary Fictions

How stable is the binary distinction between the documentary and the fictional? Is fiction's claim to representing reality any less valid than that of non-fiction? How does creative non-fiction conjure the sense of the Real? Can an archival document convey the depth of spiritual, emotional, and aesthetically infused intimacy on its own? What happens when the documentary and the fictional overlap to produce competing versions of the Real? What is at stake in such an overlap when the competing versions of the Real vie for a definitive, true account of events past and present?



This class investigates various genres of storytelling that appeal to the documentary and the factual in pursuit of authenticity: propaganda, counter-propaganda, conspiracy theories, political and artistic manifestos, historical fiction and cinema, diary writing, autobiography and memoir, and documentary photography and film. Focusing geographically on East-Central Europe and Russia and chronologically on the last 100 years, the class will take up such thematic units as civil war, socialist realism, capitalist realism, the deaths of dictators, revolutionary hagiography, homefront narratives, and survivor testimony.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CHUM323, REES226, COL322
Prereq: None

RUSS233 Introduction to Russian and Soviet Cinema

This course provides an introduction to the history and poetics of imperial Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Russian cinema. From the avant-garde experimentation of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov to the masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Kira Muratova, the course will explore the development of film from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods as artistic medium and as national tradition. The discussion and comparative analyses of different forms and genres, including silent cinema, propaganda films, blockbusters, and auteur cinema, will be situated within the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia, Ukraine, and Armenia.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES233, RULE233, FILM333, WLIT255
Prereq: None

RUSS234 Introduction to Russian and Soviet Cinema (CLAC.50)

This course provides an introduction to the history and poetics of Soviet and Russian cinema--in Russian. From the avant-garde experimentation of Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov to the masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Parajanov, and Kira Muratova, the course will explore the development of Russian film as artistic medium and as national tradition. The discussion and comparative analyses of different forms and genres, including silent cinema, propaganda films, blockbusters, and auteur cinema, will be situated within the cultural, political, and aesthetic contexts of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. Students will learn the key works, names, events, and concepts of the Russian cinematic tradition. They will develop skills in analyzing and interpreting films and will acquire the basic critical terminology of film studies in Russian and English. They will also learn how film form and aesthetics are conditioned by technology, ideology, economics, theory, tradition, and culture. The overarching goal is to see how cinema in Russia and the Soviet Union has created and contested narratives of history and identity, how cinema has served the interests of the state, and how it has defied them. This class consists of lectures and focused discussion of films. It will be taught in Russian and is open to students who have successfully completed RUSS202, as well as to heritage and native speakers. Students can expect to practice speaking Russian and honing their writing skills. Credit: 0.5
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: CGST234, FILM234, REES234
Prereq: RUSS202

RUSS235 Queer Russia

Russia is accustomed to playing the role of the "evil empire." The current ongoing war in Ukraine has resurrected the Cold War-era narratives about Russia as a dark, aggressive, and ruthless military power. The notorious legislation of recent years--whose functions range from barring Americans from adopting Russian orphans to criminalizing the so-called "gay propaganda"--have further solidified Russia's reputation as a country with little regard for human rights. Yet generations of Russian poets, artists, and writers have transformed the country's systematic oppression and violence into spectacular forms of protest and self-expression. This course focuses on gender and sexuality in exploring an alternative cultural history of Russia, which highlights its queer legacy from the nineteenth century to the present. We will examine poetry, fiction, art, memoirs, plays, films, performances, and discursive texts that showcase uniquely Russian conceptions of marriage, gender relations, gender expression, and sexual identity. Attention will be paid to the ways in which Russian and Western narratives of queerness align and diverge. In English. No knowledge of Russian is required or expected.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES235, RULE235, FGSS234
Prereq: None

RUSS240F Reading Stories: Great Short Works from Gogol to Petrushevskaya (FYS)

This course is designed to help students improve their writing through the close reading and analysis of short stories and novellas by Russian masters of the form. Students will be asked to bring to each class their ideas on how to construct an argument that could be developed into a written interpretation of the work being discussed. These discussions, along with work on building logical arguments, recognizing propaganda and disinformation, and polishing grammar and style, will inform students' own writing (four 5-page papers). We will read works from the 19th century to the late 20th century that include Tolstoy's novellas of faith, adultery, and facing death; Gogol's surreal comedies and urbanistic fantasies; Chekhov's subtle psychological tales; Bunin's reflections from exile on a lost Russia; Bulgakov's sketches of life as a country doctor; and Petrushevskaya's modern stories of the tortured lives of women in the late Soviet period.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES240F, RULE240F, WLIT240F
Prereq: None

RUSS251 Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky is widely recognized as one of the world's greatest novelists. His career begins at the end of Russian Romanticism, is interrupted by nine years of prison and exile in Siberia, and resumes at the beginning of the age of the great realist novel. Dostoevsky's major works grapple with the themes of sin and crime, the disintegration of the family, and the difficulty of believing in God in a world full of evil.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES251, RULE251, WLIT244
Prereq: None

RUSS252 Tolstoy

During the 19th century when Tolstoy wrote his novels and stories, literature was viewed in Russia as the intelligentsia's primary medium for debating its big questions (such as how to resolve the inequalities that had been institutionalized under serfdom, or how to choose between new and old values as Russia experienced modernization). Writers like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky willingly assumed the responsibility to address a broad range of political, historical, and philosophical-religious questions in their fiction, and they wrote novels with radical formulations as well as solutions to these questions. However, they also viewed literature, particularly the novel, as a medium with rich potential for innovative formal experimentation, and so they resisted the call for conventional ideological novels. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms.



For native speakers and learners who have studied Russian for at least four semesters, a half-credit course is available in which we will read excerpts from Tolstoy's works (CGST 330).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES252, COL262, RULE252, WLIT252
Prereq: None

RUSS254 Nobel Laureates: The Politics of Literature

The course examines key cultural and socio-historical moments in the development of twentieth-century Russian literature by focusing on the prose and poetry of authors awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature-Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1958), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970), Joseph Brodsky (1987), and Svetlana Alexievich (2015). Additionally, the students will read Lev Tolstoy, who rejected being nominated for the prize, as well as Vladimir Nabokov and Anna Akhmatova, who arguably merited the award but never received it. On the broader level, the class will ponder literature's relevance for shaping public discourse on cultural policies, national identities, and international relations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES254, RULE254
Prereq: None

RUSS255 Prague, Vienna, Sarajevo: 20th-Century Novels from Central and Eastern Europe

This course is a survey of 20th-century prose fiction of Central and Eastern Europe, with an emphasis on the Czech novel. The novels we will read make history come alive through the eyes of vividly individual characters. In Joseph Roth's Radetzky March, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire is viewed through the lens of a single heartbroken family; in Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England, the Czech experience in World War II and postwar Stalinization is embodied in the figure of a diminutive hotel waiter; Volodymyr Rafeyenko's Mondegreen is an experimental narrative told through the eyes of a refugee from the Ukrainian Donbas region in Kyiv who struggles with language and identity; Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk's Flights provides a constellation of short narratives that attempt to capture the place of the body in the world of travel and migration; in Witold Gombrowicz's Trans-Atlantyk and Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno, the main characters find themselves in a foreign land when their home countries (Poland and Yugoslavia, respectively) are torn apart by war. All the works we will read exemplify the high level of narrative sophistication, in realist, absurdist, and experimental modes, that is a hallmark of Central and Eastern European literature.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES255, RULE255, WLIT259
Prereq: None

RUSS256 The Soviet Century

This course begins and ends with two of the most important dates of the 20th century. On November 7, 1917, the Bolshevik party launched a revolution against the government of the Russian Empire with the aim of overthrowing not just the state but capitalism, the economic and social system that defined modern civilization. Over the coming decades, the state they created (eventually named the USSR) embarked on an unprecedented project to transform human beings and remake the world. On December 26, 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed into 15 European and Asian countries.



The Soviet project raises fundamental questions about political systems, economics, and human nature--questions that are a long way from being answered. It also shaped modern history all over the world, including in the United States, which confronted the Soviet Union as its political and ideological archenemy during the Cold War. In charting the USSR's trajectory from pariah nation after World War I to global superpower following World War II, we will move beyond the cliched view of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire. Instead, we will examine the ways in which socialist modernity offered an alternative to its capitalist twin.



In an effort to understand the contradictions of Soviet life leading up to and during the Cold War, the class will examine how the Soviets sought to rethink issues of class struggle, family structure, education, gender dynamics, race, religion, sexuality, and patriotism. We will consider the theoretical writings of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in addition to poetry and prose by Babel, Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Platonov, Pasternak, Tsvetaeva, Berggolts, and Nabokov, among others. Particular attention will be paid to underground cultures that arose in response to the repression of free speech, ethnic discrimination, and the Gulag prison system. All readings are in the English translation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-REES
Identical With: REES256, RULE256, WLIT246
Prereq: None

RUSS260 Dostoevsky's BRAT'IA KARAMAZOVY

A seminar devoted to close reading of the original text of Dostoevsky's 1879-80 novel. All students will be required to read the entire text in English, and each week specific passages will be read in Russian. In class we will analyze and discuss the text in Russian. Students will give presentations about critical works related to the novel and to Dostoevsky's work in general. Dostoevsky's novel enters into a great dialogue with the political, historical, philosophical, and religious discourses that were prevalent in 19th-century Russia. Study of the novel entails learning the various languages of 19th-century Russian culture. Close reading of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV in Russian will teach the genres and styles that Dostoevsky weaves together in his great novel. Class will be conducted in Russian.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES260
Prereq: None

RUSS267 Parody: Humor, Artistic Evolution, and Restoration of the Sacred

Parody is a form of artistic expression that has played a major role in literary history, largely through its power of critical revision. According to Russian formalist theorists of the early 20th century, parody is a driving force in literary evolution. Linda Hutcheon's formulation, that parody is "repetition with critical distance, which marks difference rather than similarity," provides perhaps the broadest and most fruitful point of departure. The course will consider various definitions of parody offered by Russian and Western theorists. After examining parody as pure humor (Woody Allen, MAD magazine, Hot Fuzz) and parody as a tool of literary evolution (Gogol and Dostoevsky), we will study the more complicated case of "restorative parody," as exemplified in the medieval practice of parodia sacra (sacred parody), discussed by theorists Mikhail Bakhtin and Olga Freidenberg. We will look at the modern manifestation of parodia sacra in Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, and of restorative parody in Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton. The course will also include discussion of legal issues raised by parody, in the case of 2 Live Crew / Roy Orbison (which led to a 1994 Supreme Court decision, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, in which Justice David Souter offered his own definition of parody). At the end of the semester, students will present their own research or creative projects related to parody.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES267, RULE267
Prereq: None

RUSS276 Contemporary Russian Literature

The course offers a survey of contemporary Russian literature, with a focus on the post-Soviet period. We will discuss how Russian literature relates, aesthetically and anthropologically, to the dynamic historical period roughly starting in 1985: perestroika, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the liberal 1990s and the emerging market economy, ethnic conflicts, and the era of Putinism. We will read works written in different aesthetic modes: documentary genre (Svetlana Alexievich, Maria Stepanova), Russian postmodern prose (Liudmila Petrushevskaya, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Sorokin), realist writers (German Sadulaev), as well as the most recent popular best-sellers and movies.



The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Russian is required.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES276, RULE276, WLIT266
Prereq: None

RUSS277 Gogol and His Legacy: Witches, Con Men, and Runaway Noses

Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), hailed as one of Russia's greatest and most distinctive writers, created a phantasmagorical world of devils and witches coexisting with the gritty details of life in Ukraine, St. Petersburg, and the Russian provinces. Gogol's satirical observations delighted socially conscious contemporary critics, while his linguistic experimentation and subversion of the rules of logic inspired later modernist writers. Roughly half of the course is devoted to major writers of the twentieth century. We will consider Gogol's interest in the demonic; his complex identity as a bilingual writer claimed by both Ukraine and Russia as one of their greatest cultural figures; the influence of his formal and linguistic experimentation on later writers such as Dostoevsky, Nabokov, and Bulgakov, with his vision of the Devil visiting Soviet Moscow; and Gogol's reception by modern Russian and Western writers and critics. The course is conducted in English.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES277, RULE277, WLIT242
Prereq: None

RUSS279 Chekhov: Prose vs. Drama

This course explores the oeuvre of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the most influential modern dramatists¿the author of such classic plays as The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Chekhov also wrote profound prose works, such as "Ward No. 6," "The Black Monk," "Rothschild¿s Violin," and "The Lady with a Lapdog."



As one of Chekhov¿s biographers put it, "Of all the Russian 'classics' he is, to non-Russians especially, the most approachable and the least alien, whether on the stage or the printed page. He lets his reader and spectator react as they wish, draw their own conclusions. He imposes no philosophy" (Donald Rayfield).



Poetic, dense, and elusive, Chekhov¿s writing continues to attract readers, spectators, and theater-makers of all kinds. Some of Chekhov's admirers believe that the quality of his fiction surpasses that of his most famous plays. This course approaches Chekhov by focusing on the tension between his prose and drama: what can a Chekhov short story accomplish that a Chekhov play cannot, and vice versa? After all, a concern with the purpose of human existence undergirds his short stories and plays alike. More specifically, studying Chekhov enables a fresh understanding of happiness and joy, of grief and sorrow in a relentlessly brutal world. An extraordinary storyteller capable of spotting dramatic conflict in the most mundane situations, Chekhov allows for rich discussions of the passage of time, conflict between generations, professional failure, the pressures of gender norms, and the costs of colonialism in late Russian Imperial society.



In addition to literary analysis, the course offers an opportunity to get acquainted with the basics of Chekhov's influence on contemporary performance. Expert guest lecturers will facilitate workshops on acting and directing Chekhov.



Film adaptations and recordings of stage performances will supplement readings. All readings and discussion are in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES279, WLIT265, RULE279
Prereq: None

RUSS290 Tolstoy Part One: War and Peace and Other Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. This course will deal with the first half of Tolstoy's career, beginning with his experiments in the narration of consciousness ("A History of Yesterday" and Childhood) and in the narration of the experience of war (Sevastopol Stories). The main part of the course will be devoted to his epic War and Peace, in which the Napoleonic invasion of 1812 serves as the vehicle for considering the nature of Russian nationhood, the place of the individual in large historical events, and the very essence of how history should be narrated. Each of Tolstoy's best works is an innovative formal experiment that creates an unprecedented, new type of novel. This course will study how Tolstoy's writings both responded to and transcended their times by creating new novelistic forms and new truths within those forms. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES290, COL276, RULE290, WLIT263
Prereq: None

RUSS291 Tolstoy Part Two: Anna Karenina and Later Works

Lev Tolstoy (1828 -1910) lived longer than any of the other major nineteenth-century Russian writers. His career began in the 1850s, as Russian literature was moving out of the age of Romanticism, and extended into the twentieth century, as modernism was becoming the dominant mode of Russian literature. His influence in Russia went far beyond literature. By the end of his life, he was the leader of a moral movement known as Tolstoyanism, the major tenets of which were pacifism, vegetarianism, and a resistance to state power verging on anarchism. This course begins with Tolstoy's mid-career masterpiece Anna Karenina, in which Tolstoy explores the problematic nature of the Russian family through the experiences of two main characters: an adulterous wife, for whom the novel is named, and an autobiographical stand-in, Konstantin Lyovin, who is a mouthpiece for many of Tolstoy's own concerns about the post-emancipation Russian economy and the pernicious influence of the West. We will also read Tolstoy's final major novel, Resurrection, which calls into question all the bases of modern society, with the prison system as the primary embodiment of societal evil. The course will be conducted in English.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES291, COL277, RULE291, WLIT264
Prereq: None

RUSS297 Music of Central Asia: From Throat-singing to Heavy Metal

The music of the Hu was chosen as the soundtrack to Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order because it sounded otherworldly to Western audiences. In fact, the Hu draw on ancient musical traditions from Central Asia, one of the most culturally and musically diverse areas of the world. This course introduces students to a wide range of music practices, genres, and styles in historically nomadic and sedentary regions of Central Asia: throat-singing, sounds of shamanic and Sufi Islamic rituals, epic performance, narrative instrumental playing, oral poetry competitions, folk and art singing, Western-influenced classical and popular music genres, including Central Asian repertoires of opera and symphony, Azerbaijani jazz, Uzbek estrada, Kazakh Q-pop and crossover music, Mongolian heavy metal and hip hop. The roles and meanings of music are discussed in relation to wider aspects of culture and social life, the impact of Soviet culture policies, post-Soviet national revival, and globalization.



The course includes a performance component. Students learn to play a variety of Kazakh and Kyrgyz musical instruments, including plucked and bowed lutes, a plucked zither, clay ocarinas, jaw harps, and percussion instruments. Previous musical training is not necessary. The course draws on extensive audiovisual materials and is open to students of all levels.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-MUSC
Identical With: MUSC297, REES297, COL298
Prereq: None

RUSS301 Third-Year Russian I

This course focuses on the development of speaking and writing skills, and reviews and reinforces grammar.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Prereq: RUSS202

RUSS302 Third-Year Russian II

This course continues to develop advanced skills in speaking and writing.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Prereq: RUSS301

RUSS321 Moscow/Berlin: Dreamworld and Catastrophe

The October Revolution of 1917 in Russia and the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany ushered in an era of imagining and building an anti-capitalist world based on the ideals of universal equality, freedom, and comradeship. Between World War I and World War II, Soviet Moscow and Weimar Berlin developed into centers of the international leftist movement that was committed to the cause of global proletarian revolution. While the revolutionary cause proved to be unattainable and costly, the period's artistic and intellectual achievements, known as the avant-garde, offer an extraordinary archive of utopian experimentation across borders.



Focusing on Moscow and Berlin, this course maps the socialist modernist aesthetic in interwar Europe and provides a comparative review of the transnational circulation of leftist and reactionary ideas registered in a variety of -isms: dadaism, expressionism, futurism, suprematism, and constructivism, as well as the New Objectivity, Bauhaus, and the practice of factography. The alignment of art and ideology will be explored through literature, art, and film and will consider the entanglements of egalitarian aspirations with nationalist agendas and emancipatory ideals with patriarchal residues. The course will also review the cultural production of Russian exiles living in Weimar Berlin and their conception of an "off-modern" path. The course will conclude with a discussion of the revolutionary avant-garde's legacy in the East Berlin underground and post-Soviet Moscow.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: REES321, GRST221, RULE321, WLIT341
Prereq: None

RUSS330 Reading Tolstoy in Russian (CLAC .50)

In this half-credit course, students will read excerpts from works by Lev Tolstoy in Russian. Class will be devoted both to translating the Russian texts and to discussing them in Russian. Non-native speakers should have studied Russian for at least four semesters.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: CGST330, REES330
Prereq: None

RUSS340 Reading Theories

In this survey of theories that have shaped the reading of literature and the analysis of culture, emphasis is on key concepts--language, identity, subjectivity, gender, power, and knowledge--and on key figures and schools such as Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Saussure, Barthes, Gramsci, Benjamin, Althusser, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, Jameson, Berlant, Moten, postmodernism, and U.S. feminism.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL295, COL339, CLST393, CEAS340, RL&L290, GRST231, RULE340, REES340
Prereq: None

RUSS350 Twentieth-Century Russian Poetry (CLAC .50)

Taught in Russian, this course is dedicated to the reading of 20th-century Russian poetry in the original (Blok, Mayakovsky, Mandesltam, Akhmatova, Brodsky, Prigov, etc.). The course is appropriate for native speakers, heritage speakers, advanced and intermediate learners (with the minimum of four semesters of Russian).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 0.50
Gen Ed Area: HA-REES
Identical With: CGST350, REES350
Prereq: RUSS202

RUSS401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

RUSS408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

RUSS409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS465 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS466 Education in the Field, Undergraduate

Students must consult with the department and class dean in advance of undertaking education in the field for approval of the nature of the responsibilities and method of evaluation.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

RUSS492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT