Harvard Slavic Literature & Culture Courses Fall 2024
FYSEMR 65P: Anton Chekhov: Stories, Plays, Productions, Films
Professor Julie Buckler W 12:45-2:45 pm
Anton Chekhov was the last of the major writers from the “classic” period of Russian literature, producing his distinctive short stories and plays during the twilight years of the Russian empire. Chekhov was formed by this cultural-historical moment, and he depicted the effects of modernity on Russia of his own time, treating a wide range of characters from different backgrounds. But Chekhov has long since transcended this original context. He is celebrated as one of the greatest short story writers of all time, and his plays are performed more frequently around the world than those of any other playwright, excepting Shakespeare. Once you’ve spent time with Chekhov, he will stay with you forever.
Chekhov’s work can be funny or very sad, and sometimes it is both at the same time. Much of Chekhov’s meaning lies in the details, and in what is not said as much as what is made explicit. This seminar seeks to sharpen your skills as a discerning reader and interpreter. We will also go beyond the page to explore Chekhov’s work as produced on stage and screen, beginning with his partnership with Konstantin Stanislavsky, the director of the Moscow Art Theater, where Chekhov’s plays were first enthusiastically received. Since then, Chekhov’s plays have been produced across a diverse range of approaches, which we’ll sample. More broadly, we will consider Chekhov’s life and times and explore his on-going reception inside Russia and around the world.
Slavic 126: Structure of Modern Russian
Professor Steven Clancy MW 3:00-4:15 pm
Introduction to Russian phonetics, phonemics, morphophonemics, and inflectional and derivational morphology. Course goal is to give a deeper understanding and appreciation of the regularities and complexities of Russian through a close study of its sounds and words.
Slavic 132: Russia's Golden Age: Literature, Arts, and Culture
Professor Julie Buckler TTh 1:30-2:45 pm
Explores major works of imperial Russian culture (1703-1917), including literature, drama, opera, ballet, music, visual arts, and architecture. At the center of this course stand the works themselves, their artistic qualities, and cultural-historical contexts, as well as the intentions of their creators, and the responses of their initial audiences. What mythologies of national identity did these works propose? In what ways were these works radical: formally, aesthetically, ideologically? How did these now-famous works achieve canonical status beyond their own time? How have these works been variously reinterpreted since then? Works by Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, and others.
Slavic 154/Complit 153: Nabokov
Professor Justin Weir M 6:00-8:00 pm
This course on the major fiction of Vladimir Nabokov begins with his major Russian novels in English translation, including The Defense, Laughter in the Dark (Camera Obscura), Invitation to a Beheading, and Despair, and concludes with classic English works, Speak, Memory, Lolita, and Pnin. Topics in the course include emigration and cross-cultural translation, literary modernism, metafiction, nostalgia and stories of childhood, as well as the literary representations of tyranny, violence, and abuse. We will pay additional attention to Nabokov’s interest in film and film aesthetics, and we will consider four screen versions of his novels (Luzhin’s Defense, Laughter in the Dark, Despair, and Lolita).
Slavic 165: Poetics of Resistance: An Introduction to Ukrainian Literature
Professor Bohdan Tokarskyi M 3:00-5:00 pm
This course will provide an overview of Ukrainian multicultural literature through the lens of the poetics of resistance. Our exploration will span the period from the genesis of modern Ukrainian literature in the 17th century to contemporary works emerging in the face of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Starting from the discussion of Ivan Kotliarevsky’s travesty of Virgil’s Aeneid, Nikolai Gogol/ Mykola Hohol’s hybrid identities and Taras Shevchenko’s resolutely anti-imperial poetry we will go on to discuss the groundbreaking feminist writing of Lesia Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska. A significant part of the course will be dedicated to the Soviet period: we will study how Ukrainian modernists both reflected Soviet culture and subverted it; we will look at how Ukrainian dissidents defied the Soviet order and managed to create outstanding literary works even in the extreme circumstances of the Gulag. Finally, we will analyze some of the poetry, prose, and film that seek to articulate the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, shedding light on its causes and stakes. In studying some of Ukraine’s literary masterpieces, we will tunnel to the heart of the phenomenon of resistance: its philosophy, aesthetics, cultural practices, and historical reverberations. Fundamentally, we will reflect on the nexus between literature and ethics, focusing on themes such as resistance against political violence and oppression, human rights discourse, feminist struggle as well as justice and solidarity.
Slavic 175: Between East and West: A Critical Mapping of Polish Culture
Professor Aleksandra Kremer W 6:00-8:00pm
This course will introduce you to the history of Polish literature and Polish cultural imagination, focusing on several questions that remain resonant to this day, such as Poland’s entangled relations with Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Belarusian, Jewish, German, and Russian cultures. Critical discussions of Polish literature and film (including readings of Polish Nobel Prize winners: Tokarczuk, Szymborska, Milosz, and Sienkiewicz) will be confronted with Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Yiddish texts. Polish culture offers examples of both the colonized and colonizing voices, offering unique insights into the study of racialization, forced displacement, dual identity, complicity, resistance, and genocide. We will discuss why Poland’s national epic poem begins with the words “Lithuania! My homeland!” and was written in France by a poet born in the area of today’s Belarus. We will consider East-Central Europe’s often-changing borders, contested memories, and the ways in which the region’s complicated past is reworked and discussed today, in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war.
Note: All readings in English. It is an introductory course – no background in Polish literature is required. Students who take this course are eligible to apply for the Slavic Department’s Jurzykowski grants for the summer language study in Poland.
Slavic 182: The Political Novel
Professor Jonathan Bolton MW 12:00-1:15 pm
No novel can be reduced to a set of political beliefs, and yet we often feel that novels speak to our political theories and practices. What makes a novel “political”? Can the novel make a contribution to political theory? How does our understanding of political power change when we imagine detailed and dramatic confrontations between individuals and the state, individuals and empire, or individuals and global ideologies? How does narrative form reinforce or undermine ideology? What archetypal dramas—protest against authority, the loss of political innocence, the battle between tolerance and conviction—have shaped the political novel in its various traditions from the nineteenth century to the present? We will consider these questions through some classic and lesser-known political novels from the nineteenth century to the present day, with readings from Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Olbracht, Arthur Koestler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Don Delillo, Léonora Miano, and others. Although we will have occasional short readings in theory, our main focus will be on the attentive reading of complex literature that cannot be reduced to allegories of political conflict or unlocked through primarily "ideological" reading.
Slavic 185: 18th-Century Russian Literature: Seminar
Professor Daria Khitrova F 12:45-2:45pm
A survey of major authors and key questions in 18th-century Russian literature: (r)evolutions in literary language; syllabo-tonic reform; style and genre systems; the status of literature in the Imperial state, etc. Studies Prokopovich, Trediakovsky, Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Fonvizin, Derzhavin, Bogdanovich, Karamzin. Good reading knowledge of Russian required.
Slavic 186: Russian Drama on Page and Stage
Professor Daria Khitrova W 6:00-8:00PM
This course has a dual focus: we will read masterpieces of Russian drama, from the early nineteenth century to the late Soviet era, and explore how they were staged by theater directors of different styles, from traditional to avant-garde. The key figures include Griboedov, Pushkin, Gogol, Sukhovo-Kobylin, Ostrovsky, Chekhov, Blok, Mayakovsky, Erdman, Schwartz, Petrushevskaia on the “page” side, and, on the “stage” side, Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Evreinov, Eisenstein, Terent’ev, Akimov. The key titles include “Woe from Wit,” “The Inspector General,” “The Cherry Orchard,” “The Fairground Booth,” “The Dragon.” No prerequisites. All readings are in English.
Slavic 187: "In the Beginning was the Pun": Readings in Soviet Postmodernism
Professor Nariman Skakov M 12:45-2:45pm
How did postmodern irony manage to thrive in totalitarian conditions? What makes Soviet postmodernist cultural output special? Or is there anything special about Soviet postmodernism? The course aims to answer these questions by exploring a complex nexus between socialist ideology and postmodern suspicion of reason. The course includes readings of literary and visual works by Venedikt Erofeev, Sasha Sokolov, Vladimir Sorokin, Dmitrii Prigov, Ilya Kabakov, Andrei Monastyrsky, Timur Novikov, and various underground movements of the Soviet “periphery”.
Slavic 189: The Other Russias: Twenty-First Century Films, Fictions. States of Mind
Professor Stephanie Sandler W 3:00-5:00 pm
Russia is in the news these days: grotesque war in Ukraine, election interference in the US, violent repressions of free speech and countless arrests at home. But Russian culture has a long history of channeling creative forms of resistance through literature, drama, and film. How have the stories, poems, plays, movies, memoirs, and documentaries of the last thirty years set up current cultural activists to find their voices and use them effectively? What has diaspora come to mean, and how have cultural figures in far-flung places created a sense of shared identity?
Our course will ask how we got to this place, and how to read its ethics and aesthetics. We will trace the chaotic transitions of the 1990s, the disparities of wealth and polarized politics of the 2000s, and the protests of the 2000s and 2010s, and the complex rise of religious thinking (Orthodox, Islam, Jewish).
We will read works set within Russia’s borders, in former Soviet republics, and much further afield, in sites of emigration and self-exile. Themes of historical trauma and reconciliation, of war and rebellion, of sexual expression and sexual freedom, and feminist and LGBTQ resistance will be explored.
Writings by Svetlana Aleksievich, Joseph Brodsky, Keti Chukhrov, Elena Fanailova, Alisa Ganieva, Linor Goralik, Boris Khersonsky, Vladimir Sorokin, Maria Stepanova, Lida Yusupova, and others. Films include The Blockade, Leviathan, Four, Alexandra, My Joy, and Beslan, Remember.
Linguistics 250: Old Church Slavonic
Professor Michael Flier TTh 10:30-11:45am
History of the first Slavic literary language, its role in Slavic civilization; phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of Old Church Slavonic; reading from canonical texts.
Slavic 299A: Slavic Graduate Proseminar
Professor Justin Weir Th 3:00-5:00 pm
Introduction to graduate study in Slavic. Selected topics in literary analysis, history, theory, and professional development. Students must complete both terms of this course (parts A and B) within the same academic year to receive credit. Reading knowledge of Russian required.