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Immigrant Memoirs: Women’s Lives from Eastern Europe to America

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2022
n this seminar we will read memoirs and personal essays (as well as a few poems and a play) written by women who had moved from eastern Europe to the United States (and in some cases to the UK and Canada, too). What did they think about their new countries? What happened to their first languages as they lived surrounded by the English language? What did their alienation and assimilation look like? How did their attitude to English evolve? We will read about identity, memory, and loss, about abandoning and rediscovering one’s ancestry, about children and adults, about working-class immigrants... Read more about Immigrant Memoirs: Women’s Lives from Eastern Europe to America

Slavic 199 hfa (Fall)/hfb (Spring) - Russian Culture in Performance

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016

A one-time only, collaborative course organized around the October, 2016 performance at Harvard of Petersburg’s Bolshoi Drama Theater’s production of The Visible Side of Life, a one-woman play about the poet Elena Shvarts. This is a year-long course, for four credits. The course will meet for four 90-minute sessions in fall, 2016 to discuss traditions of performing poetry in the theater; the history of the Bolshoi Drama Theater; Russian performances as a research topic; Russian poets’ styles of reading; poetry performance across media; and the poetry of Elena Shvarts, particularly...

Read more about Slavic 199 hfa (Fall)/hfb (Spring) - Russian Culture in Performance

Slavic 129: Russia and the Representation of Race

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Slavic 129

This course examines Russian and Soviet culture and the representation of race. We will approach this topic in terms of Russia’s own engagement with questions of race, focusing on episodes in the literary and cinematic representation of minority peoples throughout the empire and the Soviet Union. We will also consider how Russia and the Soviet Union served as a mirror in which minorities from other countries saw their experiences partially reflected.

 

Course will be taught by Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Kunichika.

Slavic 145: Russian Literature in Translation

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Slavic 145

A survey of major works of fiction from Pushkin through Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Key themes include Russia's encounter with East and West; urban and rural life; the writer and the state; generational conflict and continuity; religion and science; reform and radicalism; and the collapse of empire. Primary materials are supplemented by readings in cultural and intellectual history.

All readings in English.

Taught by Oleh Kotsyuba. 

Slavic 168: Post-Soviet and Post-Modern Ukrainian Literature

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Slavic 168

Focus on Dibrova and the onset of Post-Sovietism; the post-modernist performance of Andrukhovych  and the Bu-Ba-Bu circle; Izdryk; Prochasko; Kurkov, Zabuzhko and feminist and anti-feminist writing, Zhadan and the post-modern nostalgia for the USSR; Ukrainian literature in the diaspora: Yurij Tarnawsky and Vasyl Makhno.

 

All texts can be read in English translation

Taught by George Grabowicz. 

Slavic 170: War and Literature: Responses to WWII in Polish Culture

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Slavic 170

The survey course War and Literature will introduce you to the works of Polish art and literature which resulted from direct experiences, collective memory, or an individual study of the Second World War, the event which demanded a radical revision of artistic means of expression, and continuously has numerous repercussions for Polish culture and politics.

Taught by Aleksandra Kremer. 

Slavic 191: Russian Orthodoxy

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Slavic 191

This course examines the development and role of the Orthodox Church in Imperial Russia, with particular attention to belief and believers, to domestic and transnational contexts.

Course will be taught by Visiting Professor, Gregory Freeze.

Slavic 193: Russian and Soviet Silent Film

Semester: 

Fall

Offered: 

2016
Slavic 193

Explores filmmaking and film culture from Imperial to early Soviet Russia; from the former’s deep and deliberately slow psychological melodramas directed by Yevgeni Bauer to super-dynamic, politically charged montage movies that brought fame to directors as different as Dziga Vertov, Lev Kuleshov, and Sergei Eisenstein. 

All readings will be in English.

Taught by Daria Khitrova.